The shift to cloud infrastructure has become one of the largest areas of enterprise technology investment in recent years. Gartner projects that worldwide spending on infrastructure as a service will reach $287 billion in 2026, an increase of 29.3% from 2025. Companies are allocating significant funds to cloud platforms as they modernize applications, expand digital services, and build the infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence (AI).
But higher spending does not guarantee better business performance. In its 2026 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera found that organizations estimate they waste 29% of their spending on infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings. The survey covered 753 cloud leaders and practitioners.
This gap between investment and value makes process redesign an essential part of cloud migration. When a company transfers an outdated workflow into cloud, it does not eliminate the waste. It turns that waste into a recurring operating expense.
Let’s look at a company that moves its purchasing system to the cloud. Although the interface improves, every request still passes through six people. Employees continue correcting duplicate entries and maintaining separate spreadsheets. An approval that took five days still takes five days. The company has modernized its infrastructure without modernizing the work.
Migration teams often treat these processes as fixed requirements and ask the new platform to reproduce every report, approval path, and exception. This may preserve continuity, but it also preserves inefficiency. Moving a purchasing form online achieves little if it still requires six approvals when two would provide adequate control.
On-premises infrastructure often hides inefficiency inside fixed costs. Cloud services make consumption more visible because providers may charge for computing capacity, storage, database activity, software users, API calls, and data transfers. This model allows companies to scale efficiently when demand changes. It also means that waste can generate a bill each time it occurs.
If the purchasing workflow duplicates documents and transfers data between applications, each transaction consumes additional resources. The company must maintain those integrations and may need extra licenses for unnecessary approvers.
The costs begin before launch. Consultants and developers must rebuild and test the workflow before training employees. IT teams must then maintain their customizations and investigate failures.
The cloud also cannot recover the hours employees spend chasing decisions or entering information the company already holds. As transaction volumes rise, the infrastructure and the administrative burden scale together.
The company therefore pays to migrate the inefficiency, operate it, support it, and eventually modify it again.
Automation can deliver substantial gains when a process has clear rules, reliable data, and defined ownership. Applied to a confused workflow, however, it can spread mistakes faster and make them harder to detect.
Excessive customization creates similar difficulties. Companies sometimes reject standardized cloud workflows and commission custom fields, reports, and exceptions simply to preserve established procedures that provide no competitive or regulatory value.
Customization makes testing and upgrades more difficult. Over time, a cloud platform can become as complex and inflexible as the legacy system it replaced.
Process complexity also increases security and compliance costs. Each integration, user role, and data copy expands the environment that teams must monitor. Manual handoffs encourage employees to circulate files or use unapproved tools. Simplifying the workflow reduces opportunities for data leaks, outdated permissions, and failed controls.
Companies should examine how work actually happens before deciding how to move it. A technical assessment may describe the applications but miss the spreadsheet used to track delays or the emails employees send to obtain approvals. Process owners, frontline staff, and technical teams each see different sources of cost.
Together, they should map the workflow from the initial request to the final outcome. The review should establish why the process exists, which controls remain necessary, where employees enter or transfer data, and who takes responsibility when something goes wrong. The company can then remove obsolete reports, combine duplicate records, reduce unnecessary approvals, and standardize the remaining steps before automating them.
Cloud migration should therefore be viewed as more than an infrastructure project. It can be an opportunity to examine how the business operates and identify where technology can make that work faster, simpler, and less expensive.
The objective is not to reproduce every existing process in a new environment. It is to determine which parts of the process are necessary, which can be simplified, and which can be eliminated altogether. A migration can provide a natural point to consolidate applications, retire redundant tools, reduce manual work, standardize workflows, and automate routine tasks.
This can also change the economics of the migration. Reducing unnecessary steps before they are moved to the cloud can lower infrastructure consumption, licensing requirements, integration costs, and ongoing support effort. More importantly, it can reduce the operational costs that infrastructure spending alone does not capture: the employee hours spent entering the same information twice, waiting for approvals, reconciling conflicting records, or maintaining workarounds.
In that sense, the question should not simply be whether a process is ready for the cloud. The more valuable question is what the process could look like if the company were designing it today. Migration creates a rare opportunity to challenge assumptions that may have accumulated over years of working around the limitations of legacy systems.
The strongest cloud migrations therefore treat modernization as a business improvement exercise, not just a technology replacement. The cloud becomes the foundation for a more efficient operating model rather than simply a new location for the old one.
This work does not require an organization to redesign every process before moving anything. A lift-and-shift migration can provide a sensible first step when a company must close a data center, replace unsupported technology, or meet an urgent deadline. The mistake lies in treating that technical move as a completed transformation. Without a planned second phase, temporary compromises can quickly become permanent features of the cloud environment.
Teams can begin with high-volume, expensive, or risky workflows and set clear measures for improvement. In the purchasing example, the company might aim to reduce approval time from five days to one, eliminate duplicate supplier entries, and maintain a complete audit trail. These targets shift attention from whether the cloud system reproduces every legacy function to whether it produces a better business result.
Cloud technology can provide flexibility, resilience, and access to powerful digital tools. It cannot decide which approvals matter or why employees rely on unofficial spreadsheets. Business leaders must answer those questions.
Before deciding where a workload should run, they should ask whether the work should run this way at all. The answer will determine whether the cloud becomes a platform for improvement or an expensive new home for old problems.