CIOs Shift From 'Cloud-First' To 'Cloud-Smart'
CIO, December 8,2025
Facing mounting expenses, IT leaders are rethinking their approaches to the cloud to be more cost-effective and efficient - and more strategically aligned with business value.
Common wisdom has long held that a cloud-first approach will gain CIOs benefits such as agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency for their applications and workloads. While cloud remains most IT leaders' preferred infrastructure platform, many are rethinking their cloud strategies, pivoting from cloud-first to 'cloud-smart' by choosing the best approach for specific workloads rather than just moving everything off-premises and prioritizing cloud over other considerations for new initiatives.