The Cloud Wild West (And How to Tame It)

Your cloud bills are exploding. Teams are working in silos. You're wondering if moving to the cloud was a massive mistake. Here's the thing—the cloud isn't broken. Your operating model is.

I've been watching organizations struggle with this same pattern for years. They migrate to the cloud expecting immediate savings and agility. Instead, they get chaos and cost overruns. The problem isn't the technology—it's that they're trying to drive their horse and buggy on the interstate.

The Problem You Didn't Know You Had

Most enterprise IT groups don't even realize they have an operating model. But they do. It's surprisingly similar from company to company: manual processes, stage gates, lots of approvals. This worked fine when you bought a server once and depreciated it over five years.

But cloud is different. It's consumption-based, dynamic, and designed for agility. When you force your old processes onto this new environment, you effectively turn off everything that makes cloud valuable.

I recently sat down with Jeff Weeks and Michelle Dupois from WWT to dig into this challenge. Jeff has spent five years developing frameworks to get organizations out of what he calls the "cloud wild west." Michelle is one of only 300 certified FinOps professionals globally, and she gets fired up when people think cloud finance is just about cutting costs.

Their insights from working with real customers—not academic theory—reveal exactly what needs to change.

Three Operational Shifts That Actually Matter

1. From Infrastructure Owner to Service Broker

The biggest shift happens when your infrastructure team stops being ticket-takers and starts being service brokers. Instead of waiting for requests, they're reaching out to understand what application teams actually need from the cloud.

Jeff puts it perfectly: "You need to shift from 'I just do this one thing and hand it off' to 'I'm identifying my customers and trying to understand what they want so I can provide it when and how they need it.'"

This isn't just about being customer-friendly. It's about survival. The application teams are getting more control over infrastructure decisions whether your IT department likes it or not.

2. From Cost-Cutting to Value Optimization

Michelle's perspective on FinOps cuts right through the typical "cloud will save us money" myth: "People went into the cloud thinking it might be cheaper. That hasn't necessarily paid off for them."

But here's what she's learned: visibility changes everything. Just like getting daily electricity usage alerts, when teams can see their cloud spend in real-time, they start making different decisions.

The goal isn't to spend less—it's to connect spending to business value. That spike in your cloud bill might be perfectly justified if it's supporting a critical upgrade. The key is knowing about it when it happens, not at the end of the month.

3. From Technology-First to Business-Aligned

This is where most organizations get it backwards. They build beautiful, secure cloud infrastructure and then wonder why no one uses it effectively.

The cloud operating model starts with understanding what your business actually needs to accomplish. Only then do you design the people, processes, and guardrails to make it happen safely and efficiently.

The Four-Phase Recovery Plan

Based on their work with enterprise customers, Jeff and Michelle have developed a pragmatic approach that meets organizations where they are:

Phase 1: Establish Your Foundation

Like building a house, you need a solid foundation before you move in. This phase focuses on setting up basic governance, defining roles, and establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence that actually gets things done (not another bureaucratic review board).

The CCOE becomes your coach, not your traffic cop. They're encouraging the right behaviors and making it easy for teams to consume cloud services properly.

Phase 2: Scale with Confidence

Once you've piloted a few workloads and learned the ropes, automation starts to pay off. This is where you can begin moving significant portions of your portfolio to the cloud without creating operational chaos.

Phase 3: Optimize for Efficiency

Many organizations do lift-and-shift migrations to avoid hardware refreshes or close data centers. That's fine, but your costs and operational overhead will be terrible until you optimize for cloud-native patterns.

Phase 4: Innovate for Differentiation

This final phase isn't about technology—it's about business alignment. When your IT organization has mastered this new set of tools, they can help differentiate or disrupt your markets in ways that weren't possible before.

The "Smart Cloud" Reality

Here's what's evolved since the "cloud-first" days: it's now about smart cloud placement. Not everything belongs in public cloud, and that's okay.

Jeff calls it a "cloud estate"—think of it like having different houses for different purposes. You want the same experience whether you're using AWS, Azure, your private cloud, or on-premises infrastructure.

This makes the operating model even more important. You need consistent processes, policies, and guardrails across all platforms so teams don't have to relearn everything when they move from one environment to another.

Where Most Organizations Get Stuck

The biggest trap I see is perfectionism. Teams try to design the perfect cloud environment before moving any workloads. Meanwhile, they're burning budget on hardware refreshes and missing competitive opportunities.

Michelle's advice resonates: start with small wins. Show value quickly. Build momentum. The organization needs to see why this change matters before they'll embrace the harder cultural shifts.

Remember, this is organizational change management. As Michelle puts it: "Change is good until you're the one who has to change."

Your Next Move

Start by answering these three questions:

1. Why are we moving to cloud? (Beyond "everyone else is doing it")
2. Who are our internal customers? (The application teams consuming infrastructure)
3. What's the gap between where we are and where we need to be?

Once you understand that gap, you can make informed decisions about what to fix first.

The cloud operating model isn't just about technology—it's about adapting your organization to harness what makes cloud different. Get this foundation right, and everything else becomes possible.

This post is based on insights from WWT's Cloud Priorities research and conversations with Jeff Weeks and Michelle Dupois. You can find the complete research and hear the full discussion at wwt.com/research.

Having similar challenges with your cloud operating model? Let's discuss what's working (and what isn't).