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Cloud

Cloud Strategy

Cloud with conviction

The right cloud strategy is the one that fits your workloads, budget, and timeline. We build that plan with you and then stay to execute it.
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Cloud costs and complexity on the rise

Cloud used to be a destination. Now it’s a set of tradeoffs. Public cloud offers elasticity, but lift-and-shift migrations routinely cost far more than the on-premises environments they replaced. Hybrid and multi-cloud spread workloads across providers, but that also drives up complexity. Meanwhile, renewals from major vendors are reshaping budgets on short notice, and the people who sort it all out are consumed with keeping the current environment running.  

When strategy work gets postponed, the cloud tab keeps climbing.

 

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The CBTS approach

Enterprise cloud strategy services

We start with a candid assessment of your environment, spend, and application portfolio. Before any platform decision is made, we align on business objectives and what success looks like. Then we build a prioritized roadmap that includes workload placement, sequencing, and a cost model. For environments already in the cloud, we identify the spend that lift-and-shift left behind and suggest ways to bring it down.  

Cloud Strategy capabilities

 These are the capabilities we bring to help sharpen cloud performance. 

Where to start

Advisory engagements

A CBTS advisory is a time-bound, fixed-fee engagement designed to give you a clear answer to a specific strategic question — fast. 

Cloud Migration Assessment & Wave Planning

Best for: Organizations facing a migration or re-platforming decision (including Broadcom/VMware-driven moves) that want a sequenced, dependency-aware plan before committing budget or moving workloads.

You walk away with:

  • Application inventory and dependency map across the migration scope
  • Per-workload assessment of the right destination (public cloud, managed infrastructure, or stay-put) and the right approach (rehost, replatform, modernize, or retire)
  • A wave-sequenced migration roadmap that orders the move from lower-risk proof workloads to complex interdependent systems
  • A defensible total cost model comparing current-state spend against projected future-state spend
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What success looks like

 An effective cloud strategy empowers you to make better decisions and achieve higher performance. Three outcomes show up most consistently.

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Cost optimization

 The biggest cloud cost lever is upstream of FinOps. Workload placement, right-sizing, and architecture decisions made during strategy work determine whether the bill is manageable a year later. CBTS strategy engagements routinely surface meaningful percentages of avoidable spend before any migration begins.

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Business agility

 With a coherent cloud plan, the business can say “yes” faster. Workloads land in the right environment the first time, new initiatives have a defined path to production, and platform decisions stop being one-off scrambles.

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Reduced risk

 Lift-and-shift, hyperscaler lock-in, and unmanaged sprawl all carry risks that emerge later as cost, downtime, and/or compliance exposure. Strategy work surfaces those risks early, while the decisions that drive them are still reversible.

A large enterprise was spending roughly $400,000 per month in Azure after an early lift-and-shift. CBTS helped the organization determine which workloads should remain in the cloud and which could be handled elsewhere. Through structured optimization, that monthly spend is now coming down.

Kevin Davis 1

Kevin Davis

VP, Applied AI and Data, CBTS

Don’t take our word for it

“I love the creative, tailored solutions that are delivered in a consistent and reliable way while always doing what it takes to make things right.”

Chief Technology and Information Security OfficerFinancial Services / Banking

“My team at CBTS have been trusted partners for a long time. They provide excellent technical support and pre-sales work. Their breadth of knowledge and ability to bring in the right resources have helped us steer our technology into the future.”

Managing Director, CISO, Head of TechnologyPrivate Equity / Financial Services

“CBTS treats us like a partner and not just a customer. The technical expertise is next to none and the relationship management is some of the best I have experienced.”

Director, Telecom and Architecture ServicesHealthcare

Related insights 

Frequently asked questions 

What’s included in a cloud strategy engagement? A cloud strategy engagement from CBTS covers current-state assessment, business-objective alignment, workload placement analysis, total cost of ownership and ROI modeling, and a prioritized roadmap. For organizations already operating in the cloud, it also includes optimization work to reduce the spend that early lift-and-shift migrations tend to leave behind. The goal is a defensible plan that decides what belongs in public cloud, what runs better in a managed or private environment (and what should stay where it is) before any migration begins.
How does CBTS help with Broadcom and VMware licensing changes? Broadcom’s VMware licensing changes have prompted many organizations to evaluate moving virtual workloads to another hypervisor or to public cloud. CBTS treats this as a strategy decision rather than a procurement scramble. We assess which workloads should move, which belong in public cloud, and which run more predictably in a managed environment. Then we model the true multi-year cost of each path. That analysis becomes the foundation for a re-platforming or migration plan, which our teams can help you execute.
What is the difference between cloud strategy and FinOps? FinOps is the ongoing financial-operations discipline of governing cloud spend over time. CBTS cloud strategy focuses on the technical and architectural decisions that determine that spend in the first place: workload placement, platform selection, and right-sizing. We concentrate on the engineering side of optimization, identifying the services and configurations driving cost so they can be reduced or eliminated. For many organizations, getting placement and architecture right is what makes spend predictable enough to manage.
Is cloud strategy worthwhile even if we are already in the cloud? Yes. Many organizations move to public cloud through lift-and-shift, which is the fastest path but also the most expensive way to operate long term. A cloud strategy engagement identifies workloads that are over-provisioned, services that can be consolidated or removed, and workloads that would run more cost-effectively in a managed environment. The result is lower, more predictable spend and a clearer plan for what to modernize next.

Decide before you spend

 Book a cloud strategy session and start with a plan you can defend.