5 ways to get more from your cloud investment in 2026

Executive Summary

In Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index a new type of organisation emerged: the Frontier Firm, one that combines AI-operated machine intelligence with human judgment.  

 Frontier Firms will require an optimised cloud that enables hybrid teams, where human workers can build, delegate to, and manage AI agents.  

 And this isn’t a pipe dream. Speaking to 31,000 workers across 31 countries, Microsoft found that every organisation will be on the journey to becoming a Frontier Firm within the next 2–5 years. 

 “From the boardroom to the frontline, every worker will need to think like the CEO of an agent-powered startup” explained Jared Spartaro, CMO of AI at Work for Microsoft, in a blog post promoting the report. 

 Alongside the sustained popularity of hybrid working since the COVID-19 pandemic, the growth in generative and agentic AI has driven the need for optimisation within corporate cloud environments – with the most successful optimisation programmes unlocking value, reducing waste, improving security, and delivering greater resilience. 

 In this guide for board-level and IT decision makers, we reveal five ways to optimise your cloud for the greatest return in 2026. We reveal how an outcome-based strategy can deliver greater agility for CTOs, by focusing cloud investment on optimisation that strengthens security, cuts costs, and future-proofs your business for AI readiness. 

1. Understand the need for cloud optimisation 

According to the 2025 Work Trend Index, 81% of business leaders said that they expect AI agents to be moderately, or extensively integrated into their organisation’s strategy by the end of 2026. Alongside the increasing requirements and pressures of hybrid and remote working, this has made optimisation a priority. 

 The report also found that 28% of managers are considering hiring AI workforce managers, tasked with leading hybrid teams of people and agents. Elsewhere, 32% of managers said that they plan to hire AI agent specialists within design, development and optimisation. 

 And it isn’t just the increasing requirements of AI that companies need to consider. Other topics such as rising public cloud costs and high-profile cloud outages are also making optimisation a priority.  

2. Modernise your platform for performance 

Many businesses never optimised after their lift-and-shift migrations. The workloads that were migrated in this way have often been run inefficiently, costing more than expected, and have failed to make use of cloud features that can provide a competitive advantage. 

Optimisation requires the evaluation of these older workloads, followed by a review phase, after which selected workloads can be modernised using cloud features such as SQL Paas platforms, container apps, serverless functions, modern networking and identity services, and automated scaling models.  

A modernised platform should focus time and investment on the services that deliver the greatest gains in speed, performance, scalability, integration readiness, and AI/ analytics capability.

3. Free your dev teams from maintenance struggles 

IT teams are becoming overloaded with tasks involving maintenance, patching, updates, and operational firefighting. Issues which have arisen because of structural and strategic decisions taken earlier in the cloud journey, such as: 

• Lift-and-shift migrations that never progressed to modernisation; 

• Rapid cloud evolution without dedicated oversight; 

• Processes remaining manual that should have been automated; 

• Lack of separation between platform and product responsibilities. 

 On the face of it, a cloud platform may look modernised, but still operate like a legacy on-prem stack. Optimisation directly addresses this problem by moving responsibility for governance, updates, platform reliability, and cloud change management away from internal development teams, and into a managed service model. 

 By building a modern cloud strategy, with the constant attention of a dedicated cloud partner, you free up your IT team and developers to concentrate on AI and advanced analytics, enabling faster innovation, deeper insights, and more strategic planning. 

4. Improve your resilience and continuity

Cloud optimisation in 2026 is no longer focussed on cost alone, and instead is increasingly about security, and ensuring that your environment can survive disruption. Well-publicised outages at major cloud providers are turning IT resilience into a board-level concern. 

 However, these high-profile incidents may end up having an ultimately positive effect, as they highlight the importance of strong foundations. Company boards are now asking, where are my dependencies? Are we too reliant on a single point of failure? Where are we exposed? 

 During an optimisation review, resilience is one of the first pillars that BCN explores for clients, alongside cost and security. This includes establishing whether your workloads can withstand the failure of a region, platform component, or network dependency, and whether your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) are realistic for your business.

5. Reduce your cloud costs through optimisation 

Cost pressure is one of the biggest drivers for optimisation in 2026, with many organisations that moved to the cloud during the pandemic now seeing scaling invoices that don’t match their expectations. Costs have gone up, not down. 

 In most Infrastructure Assessments undertaken by BCN, we find cost inflation caused by recurring factors, such as misconfigured workloads; unused resources; legacy VMs left running; poorly-sized databases; or services that were moved, but never modernised. Other common causes of inflated costs in the cloud include: 

• Lift-and-shift workloads running on oversized VMs 

• SQL servers running on VMs instead of PaaS equivalents 

• Non-production environments running 24/7 

• Excessive backup retention or duplicated storage. 

Ultimately, cloud costs increase because of poor architecture, governance and design, and – without optimisation – environments can also drift, and waste can hide in plain sight. Additionally, as cloud platforms evolve, a previously well-optimised environment can start to generate hidden costs, especially if older services are deprecated, or if licensing models get updated.

The checklist: 7 questions every CTO should be able to answer 

1. Do you currently optimise your cloud costs with rightsizing and reservation orders?  

Regularly reviewing your cloud environment to ensure you are getting the most value from it, and are not overpaying, is critical to managing your cloud costs. Rightsizing ensures that you are not paying for overprovisioning resources that you aren’t using but also ensures you are running on the latest product versions, where you will often get better performance from your underlying hardware, often at the same cost, or sometimes less. Committing to consumption spend via reservation orders means you can save a considerable amount in consumption, for resources that you know you are going to consume anyway. 

1. Do you configure budget alerts and thresholds to manage unexpected spikes or predicted spikes in your cloud spending?  

Ensure you are not subject to bill shocks when unexpected costs arise in your cloud environment. By being alerted about these spikes early on, you can avoid overrunning on your budgeted spend. 

1. Do you fully cost any new solutions or changes in your Azure environment? 

Any new solutions in Azure should be carefully costed so that you can predict consumption over the life of the workload and include any scaling increases to support your future user demand. 

1. In the event of a business continuity scenario will your environments be configured to meet your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)? 

Often companies rely on being able to spin up resources on demand in the event of a disaster recovery (DR) scenario. But if this also affects other Azure users, such as with a regional or platform failure, resource deployment is often in demand, and this causes contention.  

 Only by using elements such as high-availability, geo-redundancy, Azure Site Recovery (ASR), and reserved compute can you guarantee the availability of these resources in the event of a DR scenario.  Additionally, your backup and retention policy should be configured to ensure you can meet your RPOs, are you using elements such as point-in-time restore. 

1. In the event of a security breach or ransomware attack will your backups be protected and isolated so you can recover your data if encrypted or lost? 

Elements like immutable or air-gapped backups, as well as multi-admin approval deletion, are important to protect against malicious actors who may access your data. They will often attempt to delete or encrypt backups first to prevent recovery and try to force you to pay the ransom. 

1. What is the maximum amount of time your business can afford to be down? 

What’s the revenue cost for each hour you are down? Knowing the answers to these questions means that you architect your environment to meet these goals, investing in resiliency and multi-region configurations, if required, to reduce the impact of single points of failure to your business. 

1. Have you independently audited your environment for security i.e. penetration testing? 

This will highlight any security misconfigurations and exposed public endpoints without the correct protections and reveal any vulnerabilities that could be used by threat actors to access your environment and workloads.

Conclusion

Cloud optimisation is most effective when it’s structured. In 2026, rather than chasing isolated savings or reacting to individual issues, the most successful organisations will take a more strategic view of their cloud environment, balancing cost, performance, security, reliability, and operational excellence. 

 At BCN, optimisation engagements are guided by a Well-Architected approach, ensuring that improvements in one area don’t introduce risk or inefficiency in another. This framework enables you to understand where your cloud environment can improve, but also to understand why those improvements matter to your business. 

 Working with a certified Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) like BCN can also help you secure access to exclusive funding to support optimisation, innovation, and transformation within your existing Azure environment. (For example, BCN partners have secured up to £30,000 of funding from Microsoft Azure by partnering with BCN.) 

 Discover your options for optimisation with a fully-funded Infrastructure Assessment from the Azure experts at BCN. [link to Azure page/ form]