Cloud maturity assessment: A complete guide for Australian organisations

Your IT infrastructure should serve your strategy, not dictate it. Cloud is no exception, yet too many organisations treat it like it is.  

Most Australian organisations now run critical systems in cloud environments, yet few can answer these three basic questions with confidence: How secure is your cloud environment? Are you compliant with the Privacy Act and all other regulatory obligations? Are you genuinely optimising cloud spend or just reacting to the monthly bill? Without solid, board-friendly answers, it’s getting harder to justify staying the course, especially now as cloud hype has worn off.  

These are common challenges. So common, in fact, that they’re driving the trend of cloud repatriation, as organisations leave the cloud for environments they can control with less complexity, be that on-prem, colocation or private cloud. But repatriation without true strategic intention risks replacing one set of issues with another. Worse still, there’s a good chance the issues that led to your cloud migration in the first place will resurface. So, before you suggest drastic changes, you need to answer a tough question: How mature is your cloud environment?  

This is where a cloud maturity assessment comes in. Without a maturity assessment, cloud environments slowly accumulate tech debt, governance gaps and unmanaged risk. A structured cloud maturity model will give your organisation a clear benchmark for assessing current capability and building a realistic improvement roadmap. 

This guide explains what cloud maturity really looks like, how to evaluate it and why Australian organisations must treat maturity assessments as a recurring discipline, not a one-off exercise. 

 

What is a cloud maturity assessment? 

A cloud maturity assessment is a systematic evaluation of your organisation’s cloud capabilities. It covers architecture, operations, governance, security and cost management to create a comprehensive picture of how well your cloud environment is performing. It then compares your performance against industry best practices, creating a roadmap to optimising your cloud environment.  

A cloud maturity assessment follows the same principles as an IT maturity assessment, but focuses specifically on cloud infrastructure. Why the distinction? Because cloud infrastructure is the foundation for everything else in your IT stack. So, before you can evaluate anything else, you’ll need to know whether your cloud environment is up to the task – or if it’s the problem.  

  

The results of a cloud maturity assessment 

A cloud maturity assessment should give you the following outputs. These are valuable insights that will guide your next steps in optimising your cloud infrastructure.  

Current state baseline across all domains: A transparent view of where your cloud environment actually sits today. Not where you think it is or what the vendor slide said. The output provides a realistic snapshot of security, governance, cost control, operational maturity and technical capability. Your baseline should be comprehensive, covering people and processes as well as technology.  

Gap analysis against best practices and compliance requirements: A clear comparison between your current setup and what good really looks like. This includes industry best practice and relevant regulatory expectations such as APRA CPS 234 and the Privacy Act. The gap analysis should highlight exactly where things are falling short and where risk, inefficiency or non-compliance is creeping in. 

Prioritised improvement roadmap: A practical plan that outlines what to fix, ranked by importance and immediacy so you know what to fix first. The roadmap will outline improvement priorities based on what will have the biggest impact on risk, performance and cost. Prioritisation adds a crucial layer of structure, reducing the overwhelm that comes with handing leadership a list of fixes.  

Risk mitigation strategies: Specific, targeted actions to stabilise your cloud environment. These actions focus on real-world threats and operational realities, not theoretical risk models that look good in a report. 

Think of a cloud maturity assessment as your cloud environment’s health check, where you find out what’s going well, what isn’t and the opportunities for improvement. And like any health check, it shouldn’t just happen once.  

  

The Cloud maturity spectrum: The five levels of cloud maturity

Cloud maturity is not about how much cloud you use or what workloads you have in it. It’s about how intentionally and effectively you operate it. Every organisation sits somewhere on this cloud maturity spectrum. 

  

Ad hoc / Initial

Cloud use is reactive and fragmented. There is little to no governance in place and security varies across the environment. Processes are inconsistent and often depend on individual effort rather than any defined standard. 

  

Defined

This is where basic policies start to take shape and some structure begins to appear. You may have documented procedures, but they’re not always applied consistently. Automation exists, but it tends to only cover basic tasks rather than drive real operational efficiency. 

 

Managed 

This is where cloud operations become structured and reliable. Governance is formalised and consistently applied. Monitoring shifts from reactive to proactive and there’s clearer ownership and accountability across teams. 

  

Optimised 

This is where the cloud environment is actively refined, rather than left to drift. Automation is mature and embedded into day-to-day operations. Costs are managed deliberately, not just reviewed after the fact. At this stage, performance management becomes systemised through regular analysis and continuous adjustment. 

  

Innovative

At the final stage of cloud maturity, cloud doesn’t just support the organisation. It’s a strategic driver that actively shapes it. A cloud-native architecture allows your organisation to seize new opportunities, serving as the foundation for sustained innovation and growth. 

This cloud maturity model will guide your organisation through its cloud optimisation strategy by replacing guesswork with direction. Follow it correctly, and you gain clear visibility into your current state, making it easier to set realistic and achievable improvement targets. 

  

What gets evaluated in a cloud maturity assessment 

Cloud maturity assessments are comprehensive by design. They examine every aspect of your cloud infrastructure to give you a complete picture of your overall maturity level. These are the core areas that define your overall cloud maturity:  

  

Security 

This domain exposes how resilient your environment is when the pressure’s on. A cloud security audit evaluates how effectively your organisation applies core security controls. These include: identity and access management, data encryption at rest and in transit, network architecture and segmentation, vulnerability management, patching practices and the strength of security monitoring and incident response capabilities. The focus is not whether tools exist, but whether they are operationally sound and consistently enforced. 

  

Compliance 

A compliance gap analysis assesses alignment with Australian regulatory and relevant industry requirements. This includes APRA CPS 234 for APRA-regulated financial institutions, the Australian Privacy Principles, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification and verification of data sovereignty and residency obligations. The outcome is a transparent review of your compliance status. It gives you clarity on what you can evidence, where gaps exist and how to strengthen your compliance posture. 

 

Cloud risk management 

This domain looks at how well your organisation can anticipate problems before they become incidents. It evaluates your approach to cloud risk management, including how you identify and assess risks, how credible your business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities are and whether backup and recovery testing reflects real-world conditions. This includes evaluating incident response procedures and escalation paths to determine how you’ll handle pressure if it hits.  

  

Governance 

Without strong governance, cloud operations start to lose shape and discipline, allowing ad hoc processes and unmanaged risk to quietly take hold. Governance maturity is assessed through the presence and enforcement of cloud policies and standards, change management discipline and the way compliance is monitored and reported. It also examines how your organisation manages third-party vendor risk, revealing whether control extends beyond your own environment or stops at the contract boundary. 

 

Operational visibility and control

You can’t control what you can’t see. This domain focuses on how clearly you can see and manage what is happening across your cloud environment. It assesses whether you have full visibility of workloads, resources and dependencies. This includes the ability to detect shadow IT and maintain oversight across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Just as important is how effectively you monitor what’s running. This includes real-time performance tracking, cost monitoring and the ability to identify unusual or wasteful activity early. The assessment also reviews how operational work is handled day to day, covering deployment procedures, configuration management and the quality of documentation and runbooks. The aim is to determine whether operations are controlled and repeatable or dependent on guesswork and individual knowledge. 

  

Cost optimisation and FinOps 

In a mature environment, cloud costs are predictable. This part of the assessment looks at whether you’re actively managing cloud spend or simply reacting to last month’s expenses. It examines cost visibility and tracking accuracy, how well you right-size resources and whether you’re using reserved instances or savings plans strategically rather than opportunistically. It also identifies the wastage that inflates monthly bills, such as idle resources and over-provisioned infrastructure. Chargeback and showback mechanisms are reviewed to understand whether teams feel ownership over consumption or if costs are detached from accountability.  

  

Architecture and technical excellence 

This step evaluates the structural strength of your cloud environment and how well it is positioned for long-term performance. It assesses alignment with recognised cloud architecture frameworks, along with how effectively you’ve designed scalability and elasticity into core systems. High availability and disaster recovery architecture are reviewed to test resilience under pressure. It also examines levels of technical debt and the extent of true cloud-native service adoption. The goal is to determine whether your environment is built to evolve or quietly constrained by applying legacy thinking to modern infrastructure. 

  

How to conduct a cloud maturity assessment: A six-step framework 

An effective cloud maturity assessment is an honest, defensible view of your environment that’s used to drive and justify every important infrastructure decision. Whether this is handled internally or with a partner like Interactive, the process needs structure, context and discipline. Here’s how to go about it.  

  

Step 1: Define your scope and objectives

Start by getting clear on what is actually being assessed. Is this focused on one cloud platform or a full multi-cloud estate? Are you examining a specific set of workloads or the entire environment? This decision shapes everything that follows. You also need the right voices in the room. IT operations, security, compliance, finance and application owners all experience cloud differently. Their input ensures the findings reflect reality, not just infrastructure diagrams. From there, you must define your objectives. Whether the priority is security posture, cost control, compliance readiness or migration planning, clarity here prevents the assessment from drifting into vague diagnostics. 

  

Step 2: Select the assessment framework 

This is where consistency enters the room. Select a suitable cloud maturity framework to give structure to the evaluation and ensure results are measurable and repeatable. This may be established cloud provider model or a custom framework tailored to your organisational context. Be sure to consider industry-specific regulatory requirements, as these will hold sway in any infrastructure assessment. The framework you select becomes the reference point for what “good” looks like. 

  

Step 3: Gather your current state data

This phase is about confronting reality. It involves documenting existing cloud configurations and resources and reviewing existing policies, procedures and operational documentation. Collect historical data on performance, outages, costs and security incidents. To separate perception from fact, interview key personnel to understand how the environment actually behaves day to day. 

  

Step 4: Execute the assessment using a structured checklist

Now is the time to perform the evaluation using a structured cloud assessment checklist. Your checklist must cover all major domains including security, governance, operations, cost and architecture. Score each using a consistent methodology supported by evidence, not opinion. Key to an accurate assessment is doing it twice, independently of each other. This will ensure findings are comprehensive and not influenced by internal blind spots. To eliminate the risk of biases, it’s a good idea to engage an external partner for one or both assessments.  

  

Step 5: Analyse the results and identify gaps 

Now you’ve done the assessment, consolidate the results to establish the true maturity level of each domain. Measure the findings against your chosen framework, industry benchmarks and regulatory expectations. This stage includes identifying critical weaknesses and conducting a compliance gap analysis where obligations apply. 

  

Step 6: Create a prioritised roadmap 

Once you know how mature your cloud infrastructure is, now’s the time to turn insight into action. Prioritise improvements based on risk exposure, compliance urgency and organisational impact. Clear sequencing prevents overwhelm and replaces it with direction. Importantly, define the ownership, resources and success measures so the cloud maturity assessment becomes a catalyst for change, not just another document. 

  

Why Australian businesses need regular cloud maturity assessments 

A cloud maturity assessment is an ongoing discipline. The most mature organisations treat it the same way they treat financial audits or security reviews. Something that needs to be revisited, challenged and refined as conditions change. In a cloud environment that evolves daily, yesterday’s “compliant and secure” can quietly become tomorrow’s risk. 

  

Regulatory landscape evolution

Australia’s regulatory environment doesn’t stand still. APRA is refining expectations under CPS 234, with increasing emphasis on operational resilience and demonstrable security controls for APRA-regulated entities. The Essential Eight model is regularly updated by the Australian Cyber Security Centre. And as data handling practices become more scrutinised, the Privacy Act continues to shift. 

Conducting a compliance gap analysis on a regular basis ensures you stay ahead of these changes, instead of scrambling to respond after expectations have already shifted.  

  

Cloud drift and configuration changes 

Cloud environments are always moving. New services are deployed, configurations are adjusted and staff come and go. As environments grow, they become harder to fully understand. People stop doing things “the right way” and start doing them “the way that works right now”. So, they take shortcuts, and what was solid six months ago may have slowly drifted into risky territory. A regular cloud security audit helps detect this drift early, before misconfigurations, permissions sprawl or forgotten controls turn into real exposure. 

  

Technology refresh cycles 

Cloud platforms evolve fast. Providers release new capabilities constantly while older architectures slowly age. It’s not a matter of these architectures being fit-for-purpose one day and redundant the next. In reality, their functionality slowly degrades over time. So slowly, that without regular continuous improvement, this drift can be easy to overlook. As you miss opportunities to optimise performance, technical debt will build up over time. Regular assessments will highlight where modernisation is needed and where optimisation will unlock better performance, efficiency and resilience. 

  

The evolving threat landscape 

Threat actors don’t wait for annual reviews. New attack methods, vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques emerge continually. Effective cloud risk management depends on staying aligned with this reality. Reactive security is expensive, disruptive and can harm your reputation. To avoid this, run proactive cloud security assessments.  

  

Business growth and change 

Cloud requirements shift as organisations grow. Expansion, acquisitions and new services will impact operational and security demands. But it isn’t just the big shifts that demand change. Even small changes in headcount and team workflows can put strain on infrastructure that was built for a different operating reality. Regular reviews ensure infrastructure evolves with your organisation instead of holding it back.  

  

How often should you do a cloud maturity assessment? 

At least once a year. Additionally, you should also conduct one-off cloud maturity assessments after major migrations, compliance changes, security incidents or leadership shifts. These moments tend to introduce hidden risk and misalignment. 

  

The Australian context

Cloud maturity isn’t a generic global exercise. Australian organisations face specific pressures around data sovereignty, regulatory oversight and geographic resilience. Requirements for where data lives, how it is protected and how systems remain available across states fundamentally shape how Australian cloud environments should be designed and assessed. 

With data centres across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, Interactive works directly within these constraints. We help organisations balance compliance, performance and resilience without defaulting to offshore or ill-fitting models. Our focus is designing and optimising cloud infrastructure for Australian conditions.  

Importantly, your cloud maturity assessment shouldn’t exist in isolation. It complements broader governance practices, including an IT maturity assessment. This ensures technology decisions support strategy, not just operations. 

  

Taking action: From assessment to improvement

A cloud maturity assessment doesn’t deliver value on its own. It delivers direction, but the real impact comes from what happens next. A clear roadmap identifies where to start, what you can solve quickly and where longer-term structural change is required. Early improvements often focus on strengthening cloud visibility and reducing immediate risk exposure. These quick wins build momentum and create confidence. Over time, deeper changes establish sustainable governance, stronger controls and smarter optimisation. 

Building a continuous improvement culture is what separates mature cloud environments from those that drift. Cloud maturity is not a destination. It is an ongoing process that requires regular review and disciplined execution. A scheduled cloud health check helps maintain progress, catch early signs of regression and identify new opportunities as your environment and organisation evolves.  

And remember: Cloud maturity assessments on their own are as worthless as the paper they’re printed on. Define processes that mandate the embedding of insights from the assessment into daily operational workflows. That way, improvement becomes normal practice, not a special project.  

If you don’t want to go it alone, consider engaging a cloud services provider. Look for providers who understand the Australian regulatory landscape and can help with practical implementation, not just the assessment itself. Choosing the right partner is critical to achieving sustained, sustainable cloud maturity. A thorough assessment requires technical, security, governance and compliance expertise. The most efficient way to get this capability is often through external specialists, as they’ll free your in-house team to focus on business as usual. Working with a partner also reduces the bias that inevitably creeps in when testing your own environment.  

Interactive specialise in matching Australian organisations with their ideal cloud environment. Our expertise, infrastructure and dedication mean you won’t be left guessing where your cloud infrastructure stands, and what you need to do to maximise its value.  

Ready to get clarity on your cloud infrastructure? Get in touch with Interactive to book a cloud maturity assessment.