The idea of becoming a “cloud-native” enterprise carries real strategic weight, but the path there demands serious re-thinking of culture, skills, architecture, and business alignment. A Capgemini survey of 902 IT executives examined enterprise progress toward cloud-native adoption and produced a set of practical recommendations for organizations at any stage of the journey. Whether you are a legacy-laden enterprise or a fast-growing company still running on-premises infrastructure, these eight steps provide a useful framework.
1. Go Agile
According to the Capgemini report, becoming cloud-native “is less a matter of technology adoption and more one of inculcating new skills and changing old attitudes and practices.” The foundation is an agile culture — one that embraces continuous development and a genuine openness to collaboration with internal teams and external partners alike. For large, process-heavy enterprises, this cultural shift is often the hardest part of the transition and should be treated as a first-order concern, not an afterthought.
2. Go DevOps
The Capgemini authors describe DevOps as “the essential enabler of cloud-native development.” Adopting DevOps methods requires rethinking how IT operations are structured, including how teams keep existing systems running while simultaneously driving transformation. This is both a cultural shift and a technology movement — continuous integration, automated pipelines, shared ownership of reliability, and tight feedback loops between development and operations are all prerequisites for a functioning cloud-native delivery model.
3. Build the Right Skills
Cloud-native operations depend on a specific set of technical competencies. The Capgemini report highlights the ability to run microservices architectures on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and to adopt automated testing, provisioning, and deployment as core requirements. Beyond the technical layer, IT teams also need to develop the communication skills to explain the value of cloud-native approaches to senior business leaders in plain, business-relevant language — an often-overlooked capability that directly affects buy-in and funding.
4. Don’t Let ROI Paralysis Stall Progress
Traditional ROI calculations can work against cloud-native adoption. When an organization has years of investment sunk into on-premises systems, it is genuinely difficult to build a compelling financial case for wholesale replacement. The Capgemini authors acknowledge this directly and recommend shifting the frame: the benefits of cloud-native — greater business agility, faster time-to-market, improved resilience — emerge at the portfolio and competitive level, not always at the individual project level. ROI should be evaluated in that broader context.
5. Get Business Leaders Involved and Educated
Cloud-native transformation touches nearly every corner of an organization, which means business leaders cannot remain passive observers. The Capgemini report recommends actively selling the benefits of agile development and continuous delivery to non-technical executives. Cloud is the gateway to digital enterprise — a concept that resonates with leadership when framed around customer experience, competitive speed, and new revenue opportunities. Without executive understanding and sponsorship, cloud-native programs routinely stall at the pilot stage.
6. Start Small — Don’t Try to Boil the Ocean
This is familiar advice to any technology professional who has managed large-scale transformations — from client/server migrations to service-oriented architecture to data warehousing initiatives. The same principle applies here. Attempting to retrain thousands of developers in cloud-native skills simultaneously introduces too much change and too much risk. A better approach is to identify a bounded, high-value use case, prove the model, build internal expertise, and scale deliberately. Pilot teams become internal evangelists and training resources for the broader rollout.
7. Buy, Don’t Build Your Platform
The Capgemini researchers recommend adopting off-the-shelf PaaS solutions rather than building a custom platform from scratch. Options include pre-packaged PaaS offerings such as Cloud Foundry or public cloud PaaS services, as well as container-based approaches using a container orchestrator (Containers-as-a-Service). The report acknowledges that vendor or provider lock-in is a real concern, but argues that the reduction in operational complexity and cost makes commercial platforms a better long-term value proposition for most enterprises. Building a bespoke platform is a significant distraction from the core work of cloud-native application development.
8. Cultivate a Culture of Innovation
The final step is perhaps the most ongoing: building and sustaining a culture of innovation, collaboration, experimentation, and learning. The Capgemini authors note that developers in a cloud-native enterprise can no longer remain insulated from business concerns. They will be more exposed to customer experience issues and expected to think like business contributors — articulating value propositions, demonstrating revenue potential, and managing project costs and timelines alongside their engineering work. This expanded scope represents a significant evolution in what it means to be a developer in a mature cloud-native organization.
The Takeaway
Cloud-native transformation is a multi-year, organization-wide effort. The Capgemini findings reinforce that technology choices — microservices, containers, PaaS — are necessary but not sufficient. The harder work is cultural: rewiring how teams collaborate, how leaders think about technology investment, and how developers understand their role in the business. Organizations that treat cloud-native as purely an infrastructure project tend to underperform those that treat it as a strategic and organizational change program.
Source: Capgemini survey of 902 IT executives on cloud-native adoption, as reported by ZDNet (2017).