Cloud environments are becoming more complex, more distributed, and more business-critical than ever. To understand how organizations are adapting, Arctiq partnered with Gatepoint Research to survey 50 IT and DevOps leaders across financial services, industrial sectors, and technology-driven enterprises.
These respondents, ranging from senior managers to C-suite executives, share a clear message: observability, automation, and performance are now top drivers of cloud transformation, but tool sprawl and slow remediation cycles continue to hold organizations back.
Below are the insights influencing cloud strategies as organizations close out 2025 and plan for 2026.
Most organizations report operating in a hybrid cloud environment. While modernization isn’t happening overnight, the direction is clear:
12% are now fully in the cloud, emerging as early adopters that often set new benchmarks for performance and automation maturity.
The majority remain hybrid, modernizing incrementally while balancing legacy systems, compliance requirements, and cost pressures.
What this means:
Hybrid isn’t going anywhere. However, leaders are strategically increasing cloud-native workloads to enable automation, AI adoption, and improved resilience.
When asked why they’re modernizing, the answers go well beyond cost savings.
The top drivers are:
Organizations increasingly view the cloud as an innovation enabler, not just infrastructure.
Nearly one-third of surveyed organizations use five or more observability tools to monitor cloud applications.
This fragmentation creates:
Bottom line:
Teams are drowning in tools, not data. Unified observability is no longer a “nice-to-have”, it’s essential for operational clarity and speed.
Two-thirds of respondents say it takes four hours or more to resolve production issues.
This is a clear sign that:
Impact:
Long remediation cycles affect everything, from customer experience to compliance, SLAs, and engineering productivity.
28% of organizations report moderate to high use of AI, while the majority still rely on basic or occasional usage.
Yet even limited adoption is delivering tangible benefits such as:
What’s next:
As platforms embed AI more deeply, organizations will shift from experimentation to AI-powered operations.
When asked what matters most in an observability solution, leaders overwhelmingly selected Full-stack visibility.
While better user experience and SLA compliance are key priorities, 20% of respondents still struggle to articulate the benefits of modern converged observability, highlighting a need for clearer education and platform guidance.
Perhaps the most striking finding: Customer experience now outranks cost controls in tech decision-making.
Organizations are investing in:
…because these factors directly influence revenue, retention, and brand trust.
Across the survey, one theme emerges: organizations need unified observability, intelligent automation, and AI-powered insights to operate at the pace the business demands.
Tool sprawl, slow remediation, and fragmented platforms are becoming the biggest barriers to modernization, not the cloud itself.
As organizations move into 2026, leaders are prioritizing solutions that deliver: