Those of you with a cloud-first strategy: how has your approach to cloud impacted your customer base? How does a cloud-first strategy help clients?

Ideally, clients/customers see the benefit of a cloud-first strategy through good experiences and lower downtime and maintenance. The cloud environment provides inherent capabilities to perform maintenance while not taking the system down, automatically scale in peak periods to avoid downtime or slowness, much easier and cost-effective disaster recovery, often better monitoring and alerting, and many other operational benefits. Functionally, the cloud should operate the same as a managed or proprietary datacenter, only with better operational reliability, stability, and management. That said, the cloud environments also offer a number of services (e.g. Azure Data Factory) that enable technology teams to deliver functionality, reporting, etc faster and often more efficiently should they choose to use them.

I would have been tempted to announce, thanks to cloud strategy, that we could deliver more value quickly.   But it's barely the case.   

As we adopt CICD and Cloud, at the same time, we increased our security measures and controls.   At the end, it almost brought back to our starting point: being slow at delivery new functions.

So, cloud-first could change things but be aware of not adding red tape activities or other gating approval requirements.   

As for elasticity, stability, robustness, for us, it wasn't a game changer as we were quite there with on-prem as we own 2 datacenters for our activities.