Leaders at large enterprises increasingly see cloud as inevitable because of the economies of scale and the engineering and innovation capacity that major cloud providers bring. For many organizations, the question is no longer if they will move to the cloud, but how and how fast.

From the American Express experience, there are a few practical questions CIOs should focus on:

• What cloud model fits our business? Clarify whether a private, public, or hybrid model (or a mix of these) best supports your regulatory, security, and performance needs.
• How will we sequence our move? Plan the pace of migration and which applications move first, based on business value and technical readiness.
• How will we measure success? Shift the conversation from simple cost comparisons to overall business outcomes such as speed to market, resiliency, and customer experience.

American Express, for example, serves more than 100 million card members globally, so its cloud strategy is tightly linked to delivering reliable, “always on” services at scale, not just reducing infrastructure costs.

American Express has adopted a hybrid cloud architecture that lets teams build applications once, inside secure containers, and then deploy them on private cloud, public cloud, or both. This approach is paired with a strong commitment to cloud-native development.

For large enterprises, this model delivers several concrete benefits:

• Productivity and speed: Teams can tap powerful, out-of-the-box capabilities in AI, machine learning, and data analytics that previously would have taken years of engineering effort to build in-house.
• Resiliency and “always on” services: Running the same application across multiple clouds increases resiliency and supports the kind of always-available experience that customers expect.
• Scalability: Cloud-native applications are designed to scale out and in with changing volumes, which is critical for global businesses with fluctuating demand.
• Portability and reuse: Using reusable components and best practices in logging, configuration management, port binding, and dependency mapping makes applications more portable across environments.
• Long-term economics: By leveraging cloud at scale, organizations can reshape their cost structure over time, focusing on the total cost of the technology stack rather than just comparing cloud to on-premises line items.

In practice, this hybrid, cloud-native approach helps enterprises reimagine how they deliver infrastructure: not just as a back-end function, but as a flexible platform that supports faster innovation and more resilient customer experiences.

American Express’s experience highlights that successful cloud adoption is less about raw migration volume and more about maximizing business outcomes. CIOs can focus on three areas: applications, cost, and talent.

1. Application strategy

• Avoid pure lift-and-shift: Simply moving legacy applications to the cloud often delivers limited benefit.
• Prioritize cloud-native moves: You get more value by moving applications that are cloud-native, fully or partially, or by modernizing as you migrate.
• Separate technical debt from non-cloud-native apps: Distinguish between:
  • Technical debt: Out-of-date applications that need to be refreshed or retired.
  • Current but non-cloud-native apps: Modern enough to keep, but not yet designed for cloud.
• Align with refresh cycles: Use your existing application refresh cycles to gradually move the portfolio to cloud in a structured way.

2. Cost and “bubble costs”

• Look at total stack cost: The cloud is neither inherently cheaper nor more expensive. It is a different delivery model. Focus on the total cost of the technology stack, not just cloud vs. on-premises line items.
• Plan for temporary “bubble costs”: During migration, you may run parts of applications on both cloud and traditional infrastructure, which can temporarily increase your cost base. This is expected and should be planned for.

3. Talent, mindset, and the role of infrastructure teams

• Invest in skills and mindset: Training and upskilling are essential, but so is evangelizing the right mindset and tools for engineering teams.
• Don’t assume “if you build it, they will come”: Infrastructure teams must actively help developers understand and adopt new cloud capabilities.
• Act as curators of developer experience: In a modern setup, infrastructure leaders are not just builders; they are trusted partners, consultants, and advisors to software engineering teams, curating the overall developer experience.

By treating cloud as a way to reimagine service delivery—rather than a simple hosting change—CIOs can better align migration decisions, cost expectations, and talent investments with the outcomes their business cares about most.