The human cost of outdated infrastructure
Legacy systems continue to act as roadblocks to progress in the public and private sectors.
In the UK public sector alone approximately 25% of digital systems are outdated, contributing to an estimated £45 billion annually in lost productivity1. Across industries, recent high-profile system failures have led to manual, paper-based workarounds and serious operational setbacks.
These are not just technical failures. They affect real people. When digital tools are unfit for purpose, staff burn out, service delivery suffers, and public trust erodes.
The need for transformation is urgent, but success requires more than just new technology. It’s a human shift.
Without engaging people, even the best cloud strategy can fall short. That’s why your organisation needs a human-centred cloud strategy.
Why people-focused outcomes power transformation success
In the rush to modernise, many change programmes overlook a critical question: what is the transformation for, and who is it helping?
Technology decisions made in isolation from people and outcomes are unlikely to succeed, but this misalignment between business goals and IT outcomes is common.
Organisations frequently note cloud challenges such as provider complexity, budget constraints, sovereignty concerns, and resistance to change. So culture is not a side note in transformation, it’s a key player.
This is especially true in cloud adoption. Leaders must navigate not only technical change, but also shifts in governance, workforce structure, and trust. So transformation that puts people at its core – aligning their needs, capabilities, and desired outcomes – results in cloud technology that delivers.
Culture and organisational change
Fear of redundancy, low digital confidence, and lack of clarity are just some of the barriers to successful change. And cloud transformation can feel especially overwhelming without the right support – particularly when navigating the complexity of selecting a cloud provider based on sovereignty, security, and data control requirements.
Add to this cultural resistance. Top-down decisions made without staff engagement often result in shadow IT or stalled adoption, so cloud adoption is about more than just migrating workloads – it’s about building trust, managing change holistically, and enabling your people to thrive in their transformed environment.
Transformation fatigue is real, especially in the public sector where cycles of change often fail to land. A better way forward involves embedding inclusive design and involving the right people early – not just to ease adoption, but to ensure long-term success.
Rather than viewing cultural resistance as a blocker, organisations should treat it as a signal to engage their people and guide them through the complexity. CGI recommends a proactive approach through change readiness workshops and stakeholder alignment sessions that bring people into the process early.
This inclusive approach builds shared ownership of the cloud journey, surfacing latent concerns, assessing digital capability gaps, and mapping change impact across departments. It allows organisations to assess not just what to change, but why, and how to do it in a way that reflects operational realities and user needs.
Choosing the right cloud transformation partner is critical for this – not just for technical delivery, but for building trust, managing change holistically, and embedding transformation in a way that sticks. Employees are far more likely to embrace new ways of working when they understand the benefits, see how it supports their goals, and feel equipped to succeed.
Human-centred service design in cloud strategy
True transformation starts with service design principles that put people first. This means co-creation, mapping user journeys, and prioritising needs over technical wish lists. In cloud terms, this looks like:
- Flexible infrastructure that adapts to service patterns
- Cloud platforms that are usable, not just scalable
- Security and compliance that supports, not obstructs, day-to-day work.
Use case: a public sector organisation
Consider a public sector organisation moving to the cloud to modernise how citizen data is managed and accessed.
A human-centred service design approach would start by interviewing staff, administrators, and IT teams to understand their daily friction points. Perhaps they struggle with slow log-ins or data fragmentation, while administrators are buried in manual reporting.
Designing the cloud environment around these lived experiences might include building single sign-on access, automating compliance workflows, and ensuring data is presented intuitively. The result? A smoother workflow, reduced stress for staff, and improved services for citizens.
This is where CGI Cloud Connect stands out. When choosing a transformation partner, it's important to look beyond technology and consider co-designing services around people. Our collaborative discovery phase identifies pain points from both technical and human angles, helping organisations navigate the change process while keeping outcomes and experience at the centre, to shape a solution that is not only technically sound, but culturally accepted.
AI and empathy
Modern cloud transformation isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about experience.
Citizens, employees, and stakeholders expect digital services that are intuitive, responsive, and trustworthy. By combining AI-driven insights with human oversight, organisations can create personalised, empathetic experiences.
But AI alone isn't enough. Without inclusive design and good data governance, AI risks automating bias or excluding users. At CGI, we believe in blending the best of both: cloud-enabled automation for efficiency, with a commitment to trust, inclusion and human value.
This includes our AIOps solution, which integrates seamlessly with cloud platforms like CGI Cloud Connect to deliver intelligent automation across IT operations. By proactively identifying issues, recommending optimisations, and reducing alert fatigue for engineers, AIOps helps IT teams stay ahead of disruptions while focusing on what matters most – delivering value to users.
CGI Cloud Connect: aligning tech with human goals – even on a tight budget
According to CGI’s 2025 Voice of Our Clients research, 49% of executives cite legacy systems as the biggest barrier to successful digital strategy. While 57% plan to modernise 20–80% of their core applications, and 40% intend to migrate them to cloud within two years, adoption maturity still varies widely 2.
The gap between strategic ambition and operational readiness is real – and it’s why choosing a partner who can align people, outcomes, and technology is critical to success.
CGI Cloud Connect isn’t just another infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. It’s a people-centred platform designed to support transformation even under tight budget constraints, where cost optimisation, flexibility, and resilience are essential.
A partner like CGI brings deep sector knowledge, stakeholder alignment expertise, and reliable technical delivery to:
- Support structured onboarding and service design with your teams
- Provide flexible service tiers tailored to your organisational maturity and financial needs, helping to optimise spend without compromising on quality
- Maintain data sovereignty with UK-based operations and compliance, whilst minimising exposure to extra-territorial access laws such as the U.S. CLOUD Act, which can raise concerns over foreign jurisdiction
- Enhance resilience with 24/7 support, security certifications, and built-in continuity.
Whether you're modernising legacy systems, scaling services, or improving user experiences, CGI Cloud Connect helps ensure your cloud journey is led by outcomes and built around your people.
Ready to move from legacy systems to lasting success?
The next wave of digital transformation won’t be defined by tools alone, but by the way we deliver change.
Ultimately, it’s not just about cloud performance, but how people experience and succeed within that change. Organisations that invest in culture, inclusion, and outcomes-focused design will unlock the full potential of cloud.
We are here to help you embed:
- Empathy, by enabling human-centred design, inclusive transformation planning, and co-created delivery.
- Inclusion, by supporting accessibility, workforce engagement, and a cloud model that adapts to organisational realities.
- Efficiency – both cost and operational – by offering agile onboarding, fit for purpose service tiers, and integration with tools like AIOps.
With CGI, you don’t just get a platform – you gain a partner who understands people, purpose, and progress. If you’re ready to deliver secure, outcomes-driven cloud transformation with people at the heart:
Read our CGI Cloud Connect brochure
References
1. Tech Monitor (2025) UK government admits over 25% of its digital systems are outdated
About this author
Chris Curley
Director Consulting Delivery, Cloud and Networks
Chris Curley is Director Consulting Delivery for Cloud and Networks in CGI. He leads the delivery of cloud services, data centre and Edge networks, and telecommunications and voice services across public and private sectors.
