Cloud computing is here to stay. Years ago there were many discussions on whether a company should declare a cloud-first model, or not chase the latest and greatest technologies; however, at this point in time, just about every company has taken the first step towards cloud computing, and many have made the decision to be a cloud-first organization. At its most basic level, making this decision simply means that all new workloads will be deployed to the chosen cloud vendor unless it is proven that this will not be sufficient for the business requirements. Sometimes this happens due to information security (that is, government-classified or regulatory conditions), and sometimes it's because of a specific technical issue or limitation that the cloud vendor has, which is difficult to overcome in a short time. Regardless, the vast majority of new projects will end up in the cloud with various stages of maturity, as described in the CNMM earlier.

Even though this decision is common in today's IT environment, there are still challenges that need to be addressed for it to be successful. IT and business leaders need to ensure that their people and processes are aligned to a cloud-first model. In addition, developing a DevOps and agile methodology will help the organization overcome the slow and rigid nature of waterfall projects with siloed development and operations teams.