Cloud Mastery in
the Age of AI
Two years ago, EPAM surveyed IT and business executives from around the globe to understand the progress and challenges they experienced as they attempted to adopt, and then master, cloud computing. Even then, in 2023, they almost uniformly saw cloud computing as a grand challenge — not just for IT but also for the business. Opportunities for cost savings, new revenue possibilities: the majority view cloud computing as a catalyst for transformation. Today, that imperative has expanded: AI is now front and center, and cloud remains its critical foundation.
Now, in 2025, we can see that the cloud has enabled a revolution in computing: artificial intelligence can help us manage our businesses and our lives. As we learned in our 2025 AI Report, by deploying AI, executives expect to achieve breakthroughs in improved productivity, greater operational efficiency and enhanced customer experience.
Thus, much has changed — but much has not. Cloud mastery, the basis of IT and business success, is more important than ever.
Let’s see why.
Revisiting Cloud Mastery
In 2023, we asserted that mastering the cloud means harnessing all the capabilities and the complexity of the cloud to get the most for your investment. More than just a collection of IT technologies, the cloud drives new business models, markets and revenue streams. Cloud computing was, and is, transformational.
Our 2023 research also confirmed that mastering the cloud is a continuous journey. As technological innovations, such as AI, create new business opportunities, organizations must continually adapt not just their infrastructure and applications, but their cultures as well. As we learned, they are reskilling or upskilling their teams and transforming their business and IT processes. More than ever, it takes a village to stay competitive: to build and operate a computing ecosystem in the cloud, organizations must rely upon an ecosystem of experienced partners and technology and platform vendors.
That foundation is essential to unlock the possibilities of AI.
The Cloud Powers the AI-Driven Enterprise
If the cloud represented a paradigm shift in enterprise IT a decade ago, then today, so must AI, redefining the nature of applications. From web-based UIs, application servers and relational databases, applications are evolving toward a new model composed of conversational interfaces and agents, all resting on massive quantities of data, enabling hyper-personalization for end users and nuanced decision-making for executives. Indeed, nearly every enterprise application — from sales forecasting to predictive device maintenance to customer support — stands to benefit.
These new workloads all rely on the unique capabilities of the cloud:
- Massively scalable compute for such demanding applications as AI training, tuning and inferencing
- Cost-effective, well-governed data storage and data management solutions (data warehouses, data lakes and data lakehouses)
- Seamless and deep integration with core IT applications such as ERP and CRM
- New cloud-based applications for developing and testing AI-native applications
Our Success Factors Are as True Today as Ever
Mastering AI requires mastering the cloud, and the success factors we articulated in our 2023 cloud research report remain foundational to organizations’ success — not just with cloud-based applications but with AI, agent-based applications and with developments yet to come.
To revisit with a quick summary:
Executive sponsorship
FinOps & cost management
Organizations must keep up with rapid technological change to stay competitive
Strategic partnerships accelerate adoption
AI-Native Organizations Require Cloud Mastery
As we noted in the 2023 report, mastering the cloud was, and still is, the biggest challenge of our era; the success factors remain just as important today. Today’s AI services rely on the easy availability of large numbers of CPUs and GPUs, vast data pools and cloud-native application architectures like containers and serverless that are only accessible and affordable in the cloud. In fact, more than three-quarters of respondents in our AI survey agree that cloud infrastructure is critically important.
AI’s intense reliance on the cloud brings new success factors into focus:
Continuous learning is more important than ever.
As Sandra Loughlin, EPAM’s Chief Learning Scientist, remarks, “the success of AI depends not just on technology but on empowering the human expertise behind it.” The most advanced companies know this: the “disruptors” in our AI survey are hiring the most AI talent: machine learning engineers, prompt engineers, AI product managers and others; and, as we learned, they’re the ones investing the most in reskilling.
Data, simultaneously the “fuel” for AI and the most important organizational asset, must be governed and protected.
As AI-centric applications begin to appear, organizations must ensure that AI consumes the right data, that unauthorized parties (people or software) cannot access it and that it complies with governmental regulations and organizational policies.
AI, with all its potential, presents wholly new security challenges.
Some 35% of businesses surveyed say their top challenge to achieving their goals is their lack of sophisticated security programs. As noted in our recent security white paper, hackers can use AI to impersonate executives, create deepfakes and even, with corrupted training data, “poison” the models used in generative AI (GenAI) applications. Cloud and AI security professionals must be trained to recognize and be on guard against these new types of attacks.
Partnering for Cloud & AI Success
As organizations increasingly recognize the competitive advantage they can realize from AI, mastering the cloud that powers AI becomes even more of an imperative than ever. The cloud is fixed squarely at the center of enterprise IT and AI.
Partners can help. As one executive stated in our 2023 cloud survey, “Because we didn’t have the fully formed architecture and thought processes, we needed to partner.”
We’ve deployed cloud applications for thousands of customers on every cloud platform. And our AI/Run™ framework and methodologies help jump-start new and exciting AI-centric applications quickly and cost-effectively.
Mastering cloud is not just about IT readiness but about enabling the AI-powered enterprise. Our deep cloud experience combined with our AI/Run™ methodology would allow organizations to deliver value from Day 1.
