An enterprise’s cloud maturity reflects its ability to scale cloud technology and operational practices across the organization. Higher maturity levels bring increased returns on cloud investments through reduced waste, lower costs, faster development, stronger security, and better talent retention. 

Organizations can assess their cloud maturity through a Cloud Maturity Assessment, which identifies their current stage and offers resources to advance. 

There are three key stages of cloud maturity: 

  1. Adopting: At this low maturity level, individual teams use cloud services in an ad hoc manner. 
  2. Standardizing: Medium maturity involves platform teams collaborating with operations, security, and networking teams to create a unified cloud infrastructure. 
  3. Scaling: High maturity is characterized by the widespread adoption of key cloud practices, including self-service provisioning and automated remediation. 

Highly mature organizations benefit from stronger security through automated processes and better access control, faster cloud development through centralized cloud strategies, and lower costs by reducing cloud resource waste. Furthermore, scalable cloud practices help close the tech skills gap, improving staff retention and maximizing employee expertise.