Cloud strategy in the AI era: Are your cloud practices mature enough?

Out of nearly 1,200 respondents around the world, only 8% qualified as highly mature after taking the HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy survey. In the survey, we identified a number of practices that indicated an organization’s cloud agility and the maturity of their cloud practices.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen thousands of enterprises adopt cloud and navigate their digital transformation. What we’ve found is that every organization's path to cloud adoption follows a predictable pattern. We’ve taken the learnings from those thousands of customer conversations and several years of research, and we’ve distilled our findings down to a handful of questions.

Find out what stage you’re at in your cloud adoption journey, and see if you have the tools and practices that will make your teams nimble enough to handle the new security and infrastructure challenges that you’ll encounter as organizations start building AI-focused products.

»What you get when you take the assessment

Our cloud maturity assessment takes just five minutes and provides insights that can save months of misdirected effort. By answering questions about your current infrastructure and security lifecycle management practices, you'll receive a personalized report that:

• Identifies your current cloud maturity stage
• Highlights specific challenges typical for your stage
• Recommends concrete next steps for progression
• Suggests appropriate tools and approaches for your situation

»What are the stages of cloud maturity?

Most organizations fall somewhere along this spectrum:

»Stage 1: Adopting (Low maturity — tactical)

In this early stage, cloud adoption begins organically. Engineering teams are empowered to experiment and build in the cloud, often working independently. This decentralized approach can foster rapid innovation, but it usually leads to siloed workflows, inconsistent security practices, and limited cost control.

Organizations in this stage benefit from laying foundational practices like infrastructure as code, standardized workflows, and basic governance policies — early steps that boost productivity without slowing innovation.

Key signs:

• No central cloud strategy or shared standards
• Teams operating independently with different tools and processes
• Limited visibility into usage, security, or costs

»Stage 2: Standardizing (Medium maturity — strategic)

As cloud usage expands, the need for consistency becomes clear. Organizations in this stage begin taking a more strategic approach: centralizing infrastructure and security management, improving governance, and streamlining workflows.

A platform-based approach emerges, fostering collaboration across teams and reducing complexity. This is the stage where many organizations start leveraging tools and automation frameworks to shift from reactive to proactive operations.

Key signs:

• A centralized platform team managing core cloud services
• Standardized workflows and policy enforcement
• Greater efficiency, improved security, and cost optimization

»Stage 3: Scaling (High maturity — transformative)

At the highest level of maturity, organizations fully integrate cloud across their digital estate, including multiple cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and on-premises infrastructure. Cloud becomes not just an IT function, but a core enabler of business agility and innovation.

Automation, self-service provisioning, and proactive security enforcement are embedded into daily operations. Governance is enforced at scale, and teams focus on lifecycle management, not just Day 1 provisioning but long-term resilience, compliance, and optimization.

A great example of this is GitHub. Initially, GitHub’s infrastructure relied heavily on manual processes, with individual teams managing configurations and secrets in silos. By adopting HashiCorp Terraform, Consul, and Vault, GitHub centralized its infrastructure management, automated service discovery, and improved security. The results were transformative: Load balancing configuration time dropped by 96%, and security operations became significantly more robust. This shift reflects the tangible benefits of reaching high cloud maturity.

Key signs:

• End-to-end automation and integrated security
• Self-service capabilities for developers and teams
• Consistent, centralized governance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments

»Why your maturity level matters

Understanding where you are today helps you build a clear, achievable path forward. Whether you're solving tactical pain points or scaling across the enterprise, knowing your maturity level allows you to:

• Set better priorities
• Align teams and budgets
• Reduce risk through improved security and governance
• Accelerate cloud ROI

»Find out your maturity level

Take our Cloud Maturity Assessment to identify your current stage and get targeted recommendations to help you move forward with confidence.