This article is based on reporting originally published on Forbes.com, including a CXOTalk conversation between Michael Krigsman and Jay Ferro, CIO of Quikrete.
Cloud Spending Surged During the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated cloud adoption far beyond pre-crisis projections. According to a survey of 750 executives conducted by Flexera, 59 percent said their cloud usage exceeded what they had originally planned before the pandemic began. For many organizations, cloud infrastructure shifted from a strategic priority to an immediate operational necessity.
What makes this shift remarkable is not just the scale, but the speed. Businesses that had spent years debating cloud migration timelines found themselves executing those plans in days or weeks — driven by the sudden need to support fully remote workforces, maintain customer services, and preserve business continuity with no physical office access.
Cloud as a “Burning Platform”: Insights from a CIO in the Trenches
Jay Ferro, CIO of Quikrete, described cloud infrastructure as a “burning platform” in a conversation with CXOTalk’s Michael Krigsman — meaning that the urgency of the crisis left no room for hesitation. Organizations either leveraged the cloud or fell behind.
“The public cloud has protected a lot of us during this situation,” Ferro said. “It has allowed us to continue. It’s allowed business continuity to happen more smoothly.”
Ferro noted that the crisis forced a level of candid reflection that normal business conditions rarely produce. Most IT executives, he observed, had never had to think through something so widespread, touching every aspect of commerce, their organization, their employees, and their customers simultaneously.
What Cloud Actually Enabled During the Crisis
Beyond keeping the lights on, cloud platforms gave executives the tools to move faster and smarter under pressure. Ferro described the pandemic as an accelerant for capabilities that many organizations had been building toward incrementally:
- Automation at scale: Teams that previously depended on manual, on-premises processes were able to automate workflows rapidly using cloud-native tooling.
- Remote data access: Employees gained secure, platform-agnostic access to company data — whether on a laptop or a mobile device — without requiring physical proximity to a data center.
- Edge decision-making: Distributing workloads and decision-making closer to where users operate became practical at a scale that on-premises infrastructure could not easily support.
- Flexibility across providers: Whether through Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, or similar platforms, organizations that had adopted cloud were no longer constrained by on-premises compute limitations.
“I’ve talked to companies that have nearly 100 percent of their employees working remotely,” Ferro said. “They are grateful that they have access to that information in a platform-agnostic way — whether it’s on their laptop or their mobile device — that they’re able to continue to do business.”
Skeptics Became Converts
One of the more striking observations from Ferro’s perspective was the reversal among cloud skeptics. Concerns that had previously stalled cloud adoption — particularly around security and unpredictable costs — faded rapidly when the alternative was an inability to operate at all.
“I have heard so many business executives, non-IT folks, who have gone from anti-cloud, now saying ‘Why don’t we have everything in the cloud?'” Ferro noted.
This shift in perception matters beyond the immediate crisis. Executives who needed political cover to advance cloud initiatives now had visible, undeniable proof of value — delivered under the most demanding conditions possible.
A Defining Moment for CIOs
The pandemic also elevated the strategic visibility of technology leadership in a way that few anticipated. With every business function suddenly dependent on IT infrastructure, CIOs moved from back-office operators to front-line strategic decision-makers.
“All eyes are on technology. How do we access our information; how do we conduct business?” Ferro observed.
He framed the moment as an opportunity for CIOs willing to lead visibly and take ownership of outcomes. “This is certainly one of those eras in which leaders are born in trial by fire,” he said. “This is the time for leaders to show that they understand not just disaster recovery, business continuity, but also understand how their company works day-to-day, and have a grasp of the company’s operations.”
For Ferro, leading through a crisis also means protecting the team doing the actual work. “During the good times, the leaders lead from behind. Our job during a crisis is to lead from the front as CIOs in these tough times. I want to deflect heat and all of those things away from my team so that they can focus on serving our customers and serving our staff, who are doing the hard work of keeping a company going.”
What This Means for Long-Term Cloud Strategy
The COVID-19 period did more than validate cloud technology — it restructured the internal politics around cloud adoption in many organizations. CFOs and operations leaders who had been reluctant to approve cloud investments gained first-hand evidence of the business value. IT teams that had spent years building cloud foundations found those investments vindicated publicly and urgently.
The organizations best positioned to weather the crisis were those that had already made meaningful progress on cloud migration, digital operations, and remote-access infrastructure. Those that had deferred those investments faced the steepest recovery curves.
For DevOps and platform engineering teams, the lesson is direct: resilience is not a feature you add later. It is an outcome of architectural decisions made long before a crisis hits. Cloud-native infrastructure, automated deployment pipelines, and platform-agnostic data access are not nice-to-haves — they are the operational baseline that makes continuity possible when conditions change without warning.