Discover the 3 Stages of Cloud Maturity by Taking Our Quiz

Do you know the level of cloud maturity in your organization?

Cloud maturity refers to how advanced and effective your organization is in adopting and using cloud technologies. It’s about how well your infrastructure, processes, and teams are aligned to deliver scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. A mature cloud practice goes beyond lift-and-shift migrations, incorporating automation, governance, and integration with modern development practices.

It’s equally important to point out that cloud maturity is not a hard mapping to scale and/or complexity. 

A small start-up running a very simple architecture of cloud primitives ― operating with very little cloud waste ― is far more mature than an enterprise spending millions per month on untracked, underused, and unnecessary resources. What’s key is how well your practices align to benefit from cloud computing.

This can all sound very abstract, which is why many companies turn to cloud maturity quizzes as a quick way to benchmark themselves. These assessments promise to tell you whether your organization is ahead of the curve or lagging behind. 

But they often fall short; these quizzes are typically written for a broad audience, heavy on buzzwords, and light on actionable insights. 

For IT leaders and technical buyers, the real value is in a clear framework for understanding where your infrastructure stands today and what steps will move it forward.

We designed our own Cloud Maturity Quiz to be a little different. It’s practical, flexible, and focused on how teams actually work day to day. 

But even the best quiz has limits. No multiple-choice questionnaire can fully capture the complexity of your infrastructure or the specific needs of your business. Truly useful feedback requires getting into the details: how your product is built, who your customers are, and what your operational priorities look like.

That’s where the stages of cloud maturity come in. 

Instead of a one-size-fits-all score, it’s more helpful to think in terms of progressive stages that organizations move through on their journey to a mature cloud practice. Understanding these stages provides the context that quizzes can’t deliver and helps decision-makers identify not just where they are, but what comes next.

The score on the Akamai Cloud Maturity Quiz indicates where an organization is on its journey toward cloud maturity. How does your cloud strategy measure up?

Your team is in the early stages. You’re likely facing cloud sprawl and operational silos.

Beyond the score

You’re manually provisioning infrastructure, handling secrets on a case-by-case basis, and dealing with tickets for infrastructure access. Your applications are mostly monolithic or lift-and-shift workloads running on a single public cloud. This isn’t bad — it’s where most teams start. The challenge is that manual processes don’t scale, and cloud costs can spiral quickly without visibility.

What’s next

Focus on automation and centralizing governance. Review your current infrastructure, pick a service or architecture with the simplest resource tree, and begin defining those resources as definition files to be consumed by infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling, such as Pulumi or Terraform. 

In addition to basic cost tracking and alerting, you can implement policy to enforce protections against cloud sprawl. Set up monitoring for (at least) your most critical services using industry standard tooling such as Prometheus and Grafana.

Key tip

A strategy capable of overcoming the industry-wide problem of cloud waste starts with the basics of cost tracking and policy as code (PaC). Visibility from cost/budget alerts can influence better decisions by your dev teams, and PaC lays the guardrails to enforce those decisions. PaC also positions you for a tighter alignment with your security teams.      

You’ve mastered the basics and your resilience is strong, but gaps remain in automation, visibility, or security.

Beyond the score

You have a flourishing DevOps culture with IaC adoption and some self-service capabilities, and you’re decomposing code into microservices. You’re using multiple toolchains across different teams and projects, but you’re also accruing technical debt and operational complexity.

This stage is about standardization — you know what good looks like, but it’s not consistent across teams, and that is making it harder to scale.

What’s next

Standardize the technology used across your organization — from IaC tooling and developer frameworks to observability, security, and beyond. Document a single source of truth for everything that touches cloud infrastructure, including every Ops team procedure suffixed with management (e.g., secrets/change/fleet management). Implement OpenTelemetry (OTel) to standardize the collection of telemetry data and embed a unified approach to security into all of the above-mentioned processes.

Key tip

Filter out the noise by pre-defining what good looks like and tune telemetry collection so you’re only ingesting the data that matters. Use tooling like Dependabot to automate dependency management, and tools like Snyk or Trivy for implementing DevSecOps into your CI/CD pipelines. 

Put these pieces together with PaC and you’ll have a solid foundation for a hard, standardized security posture. Don’t get in your own way ― let your tooling do the heavy lifting.

You’re on the path to cloud native excellence, and your application architecture is becoming increasingly modular and extensible.

Beyond the score

You have fully automated infrastructure provisioning, centralized secrets management, and adopted a culture of DevOps practices within your organization. Your applications are cloud native, resilient, and autoscaling. Your architecture abstracts the specifics of your cloud environment(s) from the concern of your applications. You’re in the top tier — but there’s always room for optimization.

What’s next

Implement GitOps for smoother rollouts of blue/green and canary deployments and transform your code bases into a single interface for your cloud native applications and infrastructure. Find the visibility gaps and aim for end-to-end observability ― the art of analyzing a collection of logs, metrics, and traces (telemetry data) to dial-in your infrastructure performance monitoring (IPM) and application performance monitoring (APM). 

In simpler terms, end-to-end observability is being able to see the what, why, and where of something that occurred across the various pieces of your architecture.

Key tip

Organize app code and configuration/infrastructure code into different repos. Use trunk-based development (TBD) and separate environments by directory instead of git branches. Regularly review the observability practices and maintain awareness of the amount of data you’re ingesting ― your costs can become astronomical if this becomes a runaway train.  

Based on what we’ve learned from our customers and developers at Akamai, there are five areas in which improvement has the most outsized impact.

1. Cloud portability
2. GitOps 
3. Observability
4. Built-in security
5. Cost-efficiency

Building with portability in mind means building modular and extensible architectures that work smoothly on any cloud provider and/or easily take advantage of various cloud services without getting locked in. This entails a truly cloud native design philosophy, centered on open standards, open source technologies, and core cloud infrastructure primitives.

Version your infrastructure the same way that you version your application code, and tap existing processes around permission management and approval workflows. Define your infrastructure with IaC tooling such as Terraform or Pulum. Resolve configuration drift with solutions such as Ansible or Puppet, or pull-based Kubernetes tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux CD.

Given the complexity involved with distributed application architectures, the concept of end-to-end observability is typically more aspirational than anything else, but that doesn’t make it any less of a goal because you can’t fix what you can't see. Use battle-tested, vendor-neutral instrumentation such as OTel, Prometheus with Grafana, and Fluentd (just to name a few) to have a standard pane of visibility across any number of different systems and services.

Development efforts shouldn’t slow because of security, and security shouldn’t compromise to support development. This conundrum has a simple answer ― automation. A mindset shift from security first to automation first is what laid the groundwork for some notable paradigms of today, such as secure by design and secure by default. Automation is not exclusive to development/deployment processes. Practice meets security when you build security into these processes.

The latest and greatest don't help much when innovation is stunted by the cloud bill. Furthermore, problems of cloud sprawl and cloud waste most always correlate to complexity and confusion. Fintech solutions can reduce this pain, but they don’t transform a workload into one that is cost efficient by design. To design for cost efficiency requires an understanding of the what, why, and how. Make objective decisions about tooling and cloud services, and design around natively provided features, such as autoscaling and resource quotas.

There’s no such thing as fully mature infrastructure. Cloud maturity is a moving target shaped by the product, team, and customers. 

Mature teams don’t chase checklists, and they don’t succumb to FOMO. They build durable systems that are visible, flexible, and secure by default/design because that’s what helps them move fast ― and that’s what gives a good experience to the end user. Mature teams champion efficiency via processes of continuous feedback and re-evaluation.

Reaching the next cloud maturity level isn’t just about technology; it’s about aligning cloud adoption with business goals and building a cloud strategy that accelerates your innovation instead of complicating it. 

A strong cloud maturity model helps stakeholders set a clear roadmap that connects initiatives across business units, from optimizing cloud infrastructure to adopting hybrid clouds or multicloud environments.

Set up a free cloud architecture review and we’ll help you plan your next move, simplify your setup, and extend credits to implement your plan.