Cloud operating model readiness

Why run this

What this checklist is for

Architecture is usually designed for the estate the firm wants and operated by the team the firm has. When those diverge, the estate degrades rather than the design being revisited.

This checklist is about the second half. It is deliberately about capacity and capability rather than technology.

Run it with

Managing partner or COO

And with

IT lead and cloud engineers

And with

Whoever owns the budget

The checklist

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.

Section 1

Capability

Honest assessment of what your team can sustain.

The target architecture is operable by the team size you can retainAn architecture needing three specialists is a bad architecture for a firm that can keep one.
Skills gaps are identified against the target, not the current estateThe gap that matters is the one that appears after go-live.
Certification and learning time is funded and scheduledLearning that happens at weekends does not happen.
Key-person dependencies are identified and being reducedOne person holding the whole estate in their head is a risk that materialises on the day they resign.
A decision has been made about what to run and what to buyManaged services where the trade is reasonable. Not everything has to be operated in-house.

Section 2

Operations

Whether the day-to-day works without heroics.

Monitoring alerts reach a person who acts, within a defined windowAn alert routed to a shared mailbox is a log entry.
Out-of-hours responsibility is defined and agreed with those on itInformal on-call arrangements produce burnout and inconsistent response.
Runbooks exist for the operations performed most oftenWritten for somebody tired who did not build the system.
Change management is proportionate rather than absent or ceremonialBoth extremes fail. A short, real change process beats a long theoretical one.
Infrastructure is defined as code so knowledge lives in a repositoryKnowledge in a repository outlasts the person who wrote it.

Section 3

Cost and accountability

Whether spend is owned.

Every resource is tagged with an owner, a workload and an environmentEnforce by policy. Untagged resources are the spend nobody reduces.
Cost is attributed to a client engagement where applicableFor a professional services firm this matters for recoverability as well as governance.
A monthly review happens with owners attendingThe meeting is the mechanism. The tooling only makes it possible.
Budgets and forecast alerts route to the owner, not to a central mailboxAn alert to somebody who cannot act on it is noise.
Idle and orphaned resources are identified and removed on a cadenceEnvironments outlive projects unless somebody deliberately ends them.

Section 4

Client obligations

The professional services dimension.

Client environments are isolated at the subscription levelResource group separation is a weaker answer and increasingly clients know the difference.
Access to client environments is time-bound and expires automaticallyManual removal depends on somebody remembering after the engagement ended.
Teardown is automated and triggered by engagement closureEnvironments holding client data outlive engagements by years without it.
Data return and a grace period are stated in engagement termsClients occasionally need something after closure. Define it rather than improvising.
Your security questionnaire answers match the actual configurationThe questionnaire is now a sales gate. An answer you cannot evidence is a problem deferred.

What your score means

Read this against the number above

These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.

0–59%Significant gaps

Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.

60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps

Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.

85–100%Ready

The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.

Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.

Closing the gaps

If you could not tick these, start here

The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.

Architecture exceeds team capacity

Simplify or buy the operation. An estate nobody can run degrades faster than one that is slightly less elegant.

No tagging enforcement

Enforce by policy this month. Attribution is the prerequisite for every cost conversation that follows.

Client environments not isolated by subscription

Restructure. It is the answer that survives client procurement scrutiny and it is easier now than after ten engagements.

Manual access removal

Move to time-bound access packages. Expiry that happens automatically is the only kind that reliably happens.

Want a second opinion on your score?

We will review your Azure estate against the team you actually have and tell you which parts should be simplified, which should be managed, and which your team should own outright.

Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.

Keep going

Related checklists

d365-sales

professional-servicesReadiness

CRM adoption health check

Twenty questions that establish whether your CRM is a working system or an expensive reporting obligation.

June 13, 2026 · 20 checksOpen

power-bi

professional-servicesReadiness

Semantic model health check

Twenty checks on whether your Power BI model is trustworthy, performant and ready for Copilot to reason over.

February 14, 2026 · 20 checksOpen

What this checklist is for

Run it with

And with

And with

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Capability

Operations

Cost and accountability

Client obligations

Read this against the number above

If you could not tick these, start here

Architecture exceeds team capacity

No tagging enforcement

Client environments not isolated by subscription

Manual access removal

Want a second opinion on your score?

Related checklists

CRM adoption health check

Semantic model health check

Tell us what you're trying to fix

Let’s get started on something great

Phone

Email