Maturity is a term that Unicorne President Éric Pinet encounters often.
In the tech sector, maturity usually translates to a company’s size, and Pinet hears the same meaning applied when companies talk about their cloud maturity: where the indicators of progress are headcount and budget.
“The difference is not team size or IT budget, but mindset and daily practices.”
Unicorne works with Canadian companies that run workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS), helping teams design, operate, and regain control over their cloud environments as they grow. That work has revealed a mismatch between how cloud maturity is commonly understood and how it shows up in practice.
“We’ve supported five-person startups deploying code 20 times a day with impeccable cost governance, while some multinationals still struggle to automate deployments and see their cloud bills spike every quarter,” Pinet said. “The difference is not team size or IT budget, but mindset and daily practices.”
In conversation with BetaKit, Pinet revealed three simple but powerful habits that distinguish resilient cloud environments from ones where cost and complexity accumulate.
Sine qua non
One of the most common missteps Unicorne sees businesses make is what Pinet described as “maturity by accumulation.” It happens when a business racks up various cloud services, migrates servers off its own hardware, automates a few small tasks, and declares itself cloud-native.
“This approach, which we call the ‘lift-and-shift mindset,’ carries old practices into a new environment,” Pinet said, adding that teams with this mindset will often have limited visibility, siloed decision-making, and manual deployments. He said operating in the cloud doesn’t smooth over those weaknesses. If anything, the cloud only amplifies them.
For Pinet, mature teams systematically determine whether a task can be automated with provisioned code and reusable templates. Getting there starts with defining infrastructure in version-controlled code. Those definitions move through the same review processes as application software, which creates a shared record of what exists and how it was built.
This discipline is known as “Infrastructure as Code,” and Unicorne treats it as a baseline operational practice.
“Infrastructure as code is not a luxury reserved for large organizations,” Pinet added. “It is the sine qua non of cloud maturity. Without it, consistency across environments cannot be guaranteed, auditing changes is difficult, and rapid recovery after incidents is impossible.”
Observe, then optimize
Cloud costs fluctuate constantly based on how much compute, storage, and data a business consumes, and without crystal-clear visibility into what’s driving those costs, spending can drift out of control.
Pinet believes mature cloud teams bake financial discipline into their operations from day one, which means treating cost as a signal to be observed, understood, and acted on early. Financial operations, or FinOps, applies that discipline by giving engineering and finance teams shared insight into how systems behave over time, and exposing small inefficiencies before they compound.
“When you have visibility around your costs, you can identify what needs to be improved, prioritize those tasks, and execute,” Pinet said.
FinOps allows companies to view costs in real time, automate alerts, and shut down wasteful resources. Unicorne’s work has shown that organizations with strong FinOps practices often reduce cloud costs by up to 30 percent by identifying subtle patterns that can hit businesses hard down the road.
Design for failure
Last fall, an outage at Amazon Web Services temporarily brought down thousands of apps globally, including a number of Canadian tech platforms. To Pinet, events like these reinforce the reality that in the cloud, failure is inevitable.
Instead of trying to prevent the inevitable, Pinet said resilient teams decide in advance what truly needs to stay online, where backups are worth the cost, and what signals matter most during an incident.
He pointed to fellow Québec tech company Coveo as an example of how a well-prepared team handled last year’s AWS outage. Coveo relied on its own alert system, which immediately picked up on the disruption. The team was able to quickly shut down non-critical systems and reallocate capacity to keep its core search service running.
“The AWS outage showed that resilience is not a matter of budget but of deliberate design choices,” Pinet added.
Pinet believes many Canadian companies delay modernizing their cloud practices because they assume that cloud maturity only comes with a larger team or enterprise-level budget. That belief, he said, only encourages teams to operate reactively.
In Unicorne’s experience, the teams that move past that assumption tend to do so through small but deliberate shifts in how they work day to day.
“The real question,” Pinet said, “is not, ‘Do we have the resources to achieve cloud maturity?’ but ‘Can we afford not to evolve?’”
PRESENTED BY
At Unicorne, we guide Canadian companies through cultural and technical transformation. Cloud maturity cannot be bought; it must be built. We are here to guide you every step of the way. Learn more.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Kevin Ku.