This article is based on a piece originally published on Forbes.com (2020). Industry quotes are attributed to their original sources.
The Cloud Is Not One Thing
The term “cloud” in cloud computing does not refer to anything in the sky. It borrows from the curly, abstract circle that network engineers traditionally drew on diagrams to represent a loosely defined pool of connected network resources. That origin matters, because it underscores a fundamental truth: there is no single, canonical cloud. Any combination of compute resources, storage, networking tools, and optimizations can be assembled into what we call a cloud instance — and no two instances need look the same.
That variability raises an obvious question: if clouds differ so widely, can we meaningfully distinguish a basic cloud from an advanced cloud?
Why “Advanced Cloud” Is Hard to Define
Researching the phrase “advanced cloud” quickly runs into a naming problem. Dozens of cloud consultancies and managed service providers use “Advanced Cloud Services” as a brand name or marketing descriptor. The label is commercially overloaded, which makes it difficult to use the term precisely.
With that caveat in mind, it is still worth constructing a working definition — in lowercase, as a concept rather than a brand.
The Enterprise Problem: Highly Fragmented Clouds
Large enterprise organizations rarely have a single, monolithic cloud. Instead, they accumulate cloud footprints across departments, regional offices, subsidiary companies, and field teams. The result is a highly fragmented cloud environment spanning multiple data centers and geographic locations.
Fragmentation creates three compounding problems:
- Integration gaps: Systems that were not designed to talk to each other often struggle to share data reliably.
- Management overhead: Keeping every node patched, deduplicated, and consistently configured becomes exponentially harder as the number of locations grows.
- Resilience and uptime risk: Workloads strung across many servers in different data centers are harder to protect with strong SLAs and failover guarantees.
One useful working definition of an advanced cloud, then, is a highly fragmented cloud environment that nonetheless retains full integration, resilience, and uptime — while remaining within the bounds of the organization’s governance and compliance requirements. That combination is genuinely difficult to achieve and is what separates commodity cloud deployments from architecturally sophisticated ones.
Three Dimensions of Cloud Advancement
Dan Matthews, Chief Technology Officer at IFS, offered a useful framework for thinking about cloud advancement across three dimensions:
“You could think of ‘advanced’ in three dimensions where the first is the breadth of services and geographies offered — and the second is the flexibility by which they can be combined. A cloud offering a choice of hot (fast) or cold (cheap) storage in combination with VMs in two geographies is more advanced than one offering hot storage in one geography only, and no option of cold storage for VMs. And so on. Even today’s biggest cloud providers have significant restrictions in that many services are only available in a subset of geographies, and new services might only be possible to use in specific combinations. The third dimension would be how easy it is to understand and manage the services and flexibility offered — something that is critical to achieve secure and robust operations of a business relying on the cloud.”
— Dan Matthews, CTO, IFS
Breaking this down:
- Breadth: How many service types and geographic regions does the cloud cover?
- Composability: How freely can those services be mixed and matched to fit specific workload requirements?
- Manageability: How easy is it to govern, monitor, and secure the full environment without deep specialist knowledge for every sub-service?
By this framework, even the largest hyperscale cloud providers are not uniformly “advanced” — they all have gaps where particular services are unavailable in certain regions, or where new capabilities can only be combined in prescribed ways.
Scalability and the À La Carte Model
Because cloud infrastructure is fundamentally virtual, it is — in principle — easier to reshape than physical hardware. An advanced cloud should therefore be elastically scalable in both directions: scaling up to handle peak demand and scaling down to reduce cost during quiet periods.
Beyond simple scale, the advanced cloud concept implies a granular, configurable model. Rather than accepting a standard package, an organization should be able to tailor resources to precise workload needs by location. For example:
- European offices handling high-volume transactional workloads might need cloud instances optimized for data throughput.
- A North American analytics hub might need additional memory and compute capacity for running large queries.
- A regional satellite office might need primarily cold storage at low cost.
In practice, this level of granularity is available but often expensive. Most Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) charge a premium for specially tuned or reserved instances, and significant engineering effort is required to compose and manage them coherently. The ideal remains partially aspirational for most organizations.
Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Reality
Mark Troester, VP of Strategy at Progress (a cloud and data-centric business applications company), points out that most real-world organizations will never operate from a single cloud. The realistic baseline involves a mixture of cloud environments and on-premises applications:
“Even if a single cloud infrastructure is used for custom app capabilities, a different infrastructure for reporting and analytics will be required, not to mention SaaS apps that are on different cloud infrastructure. This reality is further complicated by a mix of access methods — SQL, NoSQL, REST, proprietary APIs — which stand in the way of integrating these different workloads. Organizations need to think about their API approach and consider hybrid data connectivity that leverages standard protocols for communicating across clouds or between clouds and on-premise workloads.”
— Mark Troester, VP of Strategy, Progress
Troester’s observation is important for practitioners: the path to an advanced cloud is not simply a matter of choosing the right provider. It requires a deliberate integration and API strategy that bridges heterogeneous environments — public cloud, private cloud, SaaS platforms, and on-premises systems — without creating new silos.
Key Characteristics of an Advanced Cloud Environment
Pulling the above threads together, an advanced cloud environment typically exhibits the following characteristics:
- Geographic breadth: Services available across multiple regions with consistent SLAs.
- Service composability: Ability to combine compute, storage tiers, analytics engines, and memory profiles per workload or per location.
- Elastic scalability: Genuine scale-up and scale-down without prohibitive cost penalties or re-architecture effort.
- Integration capability: Standard and open protocols (REST, SQL, etc.) that connect cloud workloads to each other and to on-premises systems.
- Governance and compliance alignment: Controls that enforce data residency, access policies, and regulatory requirements consistently across all nodes.
- Operational manageability: Unified visibility and tooling so that operators can monitor, patch, and secure the full environment without siloed workflows.
Bottom Line for DevOps and Platform Teams
The industry does not widely use the phrase “advanced cloud” as a technical term — partly because of the branding noise around it, and partly because cloud capability is a spectrum rather than a binary state. What matters in practice is asking the right questions about your environment:
- Can you compose services freely, or are you locked into preset bundles?
- Do your cloud services span the geographies your business actually operates in?
- Can you integrate workloads across clouds and on-premises systems without custom glue code for every connection?
- Is your environment scalable in both directions without significant manual intervention?
- Can you enforce governance and compliance policies uniformly across all nodes?
If the answer to most of those questions is yes, you are operating something meaningfully close to what the industry means — informally — by an advanced cloud. If not, those gaps represent your roadmap priorities.
Cloud maturity evolves continuously. The organizations that benefit most are those that treat their cloud architecture as a deliberately engineered system, not a collection of ad-hoc purchasing decisions.