This article draws on findings originally reported by Capgemini’s cloud-native research, as summarized by Forbes.
The Enterprise Cloud Maturity Gap
Individual cloud services—backup, file storage, survey tools—have proven their value in isolation for years. The harder question has always been: does cloud investment pay off at enterprise scale, especially when weighed against the cost and disruption of migrating legacy systems and retraining people?
For organizations with significant on-premises infrastructure, the risk calculus is real. Shifting existing workloads to cloud is expensive, operationally disruptive, and organizationally challenging. This is precisely why hybrid computing—keeping one foot on-premises while carefully extending into public cloud—became the dominant enterprise strategy.
But a study by Capgemini, conducted with 902 executives and co-developed with Longitudinal Research, suggests that enterprises willing to go further—building cloud-native from the ground up—are seeing outsized returns.
What “Cloud Native” Actually Means
The Capgemini report defines cloud-native applications as those built to perform optimally in the cloud—composed of independent microservices rather than tightly coupled, monolithic on-premises architectures. This distinction matters: porting a legacy monolith to cloud infrastructure is not the same as building cloud-native.
According to the study, roughly 20% of surveyed enterprises can be considered to be running on cloud-native infrastructures. On average, 15% of respondents’ new applications are built cloud-native today, with that figure projected to reach 32% within three years. The primary driver cited: the need to improve agility, scalability, and velocity—reducing time-to-market for new products and services.
What Cloud-Native Leaders Are Achieving
The report highlights a group of “cloud-native leaders”—companies building 20% or more of their applications in cloud-native environments, with an average of 43% of new applications built this way. Their self-reported results are striking:
- 84% report that cloud-native adoption has increased revenue and reduced operating costs.
- 83% say they are ahead of their peers in financial performance.
- 87% say cloud-native has enabled better customer experiences.
- 80% report reduced time-to-market for new products and services.
These leaders are also further ahead in monetizing their APIs—turning internal platform capabilities into external revenue streams. The pattern is consistent: cloud-native architecture enables faster development and deployment cycles, which compounds into competitive advantage over time.
5 Strategies to Build Cloud-Native Capability
Simply deploying new technology onto a stagnant organization produces stagnant results. The Capgemini research makes clear that technology is the easier part of the transformation—culture, skills, and strategy are the harder problems. Here are the five areas the report identifies as critical:
1. Change Attitudes and Practices Before Changing Technology
Going cloud-native is described as “less a matter of technology adoption and more one of inculcating new skills and changing old attitudes and practices.” Cloud advocates within an enterprise often face two separate battles: overcoming monolithic-era thinking inside IT, and convincing business peers that cloud-native architecture is a business investment, not just an infrastructure upgrade. Both require communication skills that engineering teams don’t always prioritize.
2. Build the Right Skillsets—Technical and Business
In the Capgemini study, skills gaps were cited as the most significant barrier to cloud-native adoption—flagged by 70% of executives. Required technical competencies include platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tooling, container orchestration, microservices design, and CI/CD pipelines. But equally important are business communication skills: developers and architects need to be able to articulate value propositions, demonstrate revenue potential, and speak credibly to C-suite stakeholders about costs and timelines. The T-shaped engineer who can do both becomes a significant organizational asset.
3. Define a Cloud Roadmap Tied to Business Growth
IT teams need to reposition themselves—from cost centers maintaining existing systems to innovation partners driving business capability. A cloud roadmap should connect technical milestones directly to business outcomes: faster feature releases, new API-driven revenue streams, improved uptime, or reduced infrastructure spend. Framing cloud infrastructure as a platform for business agility—not just a hosting alternative—is key to securing sustained executive support.
4. Start Small, Prove Value, Then Scale
The Capgemini team recommends launching with a single pilot program and a small, focused team. A contained proof-of-concept reduces risk, surfaces real operational challenges early, and produces concrete evidence of value that can be used to justify broader investment. Critically, the engineers who run the pilot become internal advocates: they can serve as trainers, mentors, and evangelists when the initiative expands. Early wins compound—both technically and politically.
5. Build a Culture of Innovation, Collaboration, and Continuous Learning
Fast, adaptive technology requires a fast, adaptive organization. Cloud-native practices like continuous delivery, infrastructure-as-code, and blameless post-mortems only work when the surrounding culture supports experimentation and learning from failure. This is where the organizational change work from point one becomes foundational—not a soft add-on, but a prerequisite for sustainable cloud-native delivery.
The management consultant Mike Hammer captured this well: “Automate a mess, get an automated mess.” Technology amplifies whatever organizational capability—or dysfunction—already exists beneath it.
Takeaway for DevOps and Platform Engineering Teams
The data from Capgemini’s research points to a consistent pattern: enterprises that commit to cloud-native architecture—and back that technical commitment with cultural and skills investment—outperform those that approach cloud as a simple infrastructure migration. The technology decisions matter, but the organizational decisions matter more. Start with culture, build skills deliberately, anchor every technical initiative to a measurable business outcome, and scale from proven pilots rather than big-bang transformations.