The report findings, which draw on a survey of 500 senior business leaders in organisations across Australia, highlight both the progress and the pain points in cloud adoption. Despite widespread adoption, the report reveals a decline in perceived cloud maturity. In 2020, two-thirds of organisations rated their cloud strategy as “effective” or “very effective”, but in 2025, that figure has dropped to just one in two.

This shift in perceived maturity reflects a growing awareness of the complexity involved in managing cloud environments and the need for more deliberate, strategic investment beyond the platform to deliver expected business outcomes and modern digital experiences.

Financial maturity is also lagging, with many organisations struggling to manage cloud costs effectively and less than half of respondents identifying their organisation as having mature cloud financial-management practices in place.

Cloud is yielding clear benefits in some areas. Respondents identified cloud computing as delivering strong gains in agility, scalability and operational efficiencies. Cloud was also recognised as acting as a critical foundation for AI, automation and analytics, enabling innovation and competitive differentiation.

Datacom’s Mike Walls. 

But challenges to realising the benefits of cloud persist around skills shortages, complex multi-cloud setups, complex billing and unexpectedly high total cost of ownership, and difficulties integrating legacy systems.

One factor that could help address some of the cloud computing pain points is the rise of containerisation. Adoption is growing rapidly, with 43 per cent of Australian organisations either currently using containerisation or planning to adopt it within the next 24 months.

By allowing multiple applications to run on the same physical or virtual machine, containerisation reduces overheads and improves resource utilisation, enabling greater deployment flexibility across platforms. The real power of containerisation lies in the foundation it creates for portability, scalability and automation. It gives teams the flexibility to deploy across platforms, integrate with modern developer tooling and accelerate innovation at scale.

Organisations need to focus on selecting the right platform for the right workload, designing for resilience and compliance, and leveraging automation and AI to drive business outcomes. Yet, as organisations look to modernise and make greater use of AI and automation, infrastructure readiness is becoming a concern. Against a backdrop of increasingly complex and unpredictable global markets, organisations need to consider if the digital infrastructure they have in place is sufficiently resilient and whether business continuity is a risk.

Only 56 per cent of respondents believe Australia’s existing in-country infrastructure has the capacity to support the large-scale compute and storage demands that AI will bring. This is particularly pressing as AI workloads continue to grow, placing pressure on data centres and cloud platforms.

Our managing director of Infrastructure Products Mark Hile has observed that the report findings point to a need for more strategic decision-making and management of cloud environments and digital assets. Indeed, amid an increasingly complex and challenging geopolitical environment, organisations should also consider whether they need to review existing decisions about platforms and workloads. Unlocking its full potential requires deliberate, ongoing management of the cloud environment.

The initial rush to cloud adoption delivered agility and scale, but the real value lies in what comes next. Organisations now need to rethink architecture, improve financial oversight and build internal capability.

Download the full report here.

Mike Walls is director of cloud at local technology services company Datacom Datacom.