CloudFirst:
A Strategic Partner for Enterprise Cloud Transformation
In an era where digital resilience defines competitive advantage, enterprise leaders face a critical challenge: how to modernize mission-critical infrastructure without compromising uptime, compliance, or operational continuity. For organizations running IBM Power Systems, including IBM i (AS/400) and AIX workloads, the stakes are particularly high. These environments power core business operations yet often lack clear migration pathways to modern cloud platforms.
CloudFirst addresses this challenge head-on. Founded in 2001 and strategically backed by Data Storage Corporation (Nasdaq: DTST), CloudFirst has built its reputation on delivering secure, scalable, and compliant cloud infrastructure tailored specifically to mission-critical workloads. With Tier-3 data centers spanning the US, UK, and Canada, and a boutique service model that prioritizes deep partnership over commoditized provisioning, CloudFirst empowers enterprises to modernize without compromise.
Following its 2025 acquisition via private equity and strategic alignment with Performive, a global provider of managed cloud and infrastructure services, CloudFirst is entering an exciting new chapter characterized by expanded scale, enhanced innovation capabilities, and truly global reach.
Ensuring Seamless Migration for Mission-Critical Workloads
Q: How does CloudFirst’s proven migration roadmap ensure a seamless transition for organizations running mission-critical workloads on IBM Power Systems?
Migration anxiety is real and justified. For enterprises dependent on IBM i and AIX environments, the risk of disruption can outweigh the perceived benefits of cloud adoption. CloudFirst eliminates this friction through a forensic, phased approach built on deep IBM expertise.
Every migration begins with a comprehensive IT assessment that maps system dependencies, establishes performance baselines, and identifies compliance risks. This forensic analysis ensures nothing is overlooked. From there, CloudFirst develops a phased transition plan designed to maintain zero disruption to business operations.
What sets CloudFirst apart is the combination of proprietary migration tooling and hands-on expertise. The team replicates production environments with precision, validates all integrations thoroughly, and executes cutovers with surgical accuracy. Throughout the entire process, business continuity remains paramount. Clients experience modernization as evolution, not revolution—seamless, controlled, and completely transparent.
Guaranteeing Business Continuity When Seconds Matter
Q: With downtime costing enterprises thousands per minute, how does CloudFirst’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) guarantee business continuity and meet strict RTO/RPO requirements?
In high-stakes industries, downtime isn’t measured in hours—it’s measured in minutes, and each one carries significant financial and reputational costs. CloudFirst’s DRaaS solution is engineered to deliver the recovery speed and reliability that modern enterprises demand.
The platform leverages automated failover capabilities, real-time data replication, and geographically redundant backup infrastructure to ensure that recovery is both rapid and reliable. High-speed recovery protocols combined with continuous data protection enable CloudFirst to meet even the most stringent Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements.
Clients benefit from 100% uptime SLAs and recovery environments that mirror production fidelity, meaning when failover occurs, operations continue without degradation. For organizations where every minute of availability directly impacts revenue and customer trust, this level of assurance is invaluable.
Compliance Without Complexity
Q: Regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS are becoming stricter. How does CloudFirst help clients remain compliant and audit-ready while mitigating cybersecurity risks?
Regulatory compliance has evolved from checkbox exercise to strategic imperative. With GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and other frameworks intensifying, enterprises need infrastructure partners who embed compliance at the foundation, not as an afterthought.
CloudFirst builds compliance into every layer of its infrastructure. The platform offers audit-ready logging, encryption both at rest and in transit, and sophisticated role-based access controls that ensure data governance meets regulatory standards. Beyond infrastructure, CloudFirst provides tailored compliance support, including gap assessments and remediation planning, ensuring clients always remain not just compliant but inspection ready.
This proactive approach transforms compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage. Clients can demonstrate regulatory readiness to partners, customers, and auditors with confidence, knowing their infrastructure meets the highest standards of data protection and governance.
The Boutique Advantage: Personalization Over Commoditization
Q: CloudFirst emphasizes a boutique-level service model. Can you share how this personalized approach differentiates your solutions from larger hyperscalers?
The hyperscaler model offers scale, but often at the cost of flexibility and personalized attention. Clients are frequently forced into rigid templates, navigate complex support tiers, and receive solutions designed for broad market segments rather than their specific business needs.
CloudFirst takes a fundamentally different approach. Every client engagement begins with listening and understanding. Rather than provisioning from standardized templates, CloudFirst co-designs environments that align with strategic business objectives. Clients receive direct access to senior engineers—not multi-tiered support queues, and benefit from SLAs adapted to business realities rather than imposed from above.
This high-touch model fosters genuine partnership. Problems are resolved faster, solutions are tailored more precisely, and clients experience cloud migration as a collaborative journey rather than a transactional service. For enterprises running mission-critical workloads, this level of responsiveness and customization isn’t a luxury—it’s essential.
Predictable Economics and Optimized Performance
Q: Many organizations cite cost reduction as their top cloud driver. How does CloudFirst’s model help businesses achieve predictable OpEx savings while optimizing infrastructure usage?
Cloud economics should be transparent and predictable. Yet many enterprises discover that hyperscaler billing models introduce complexity and unpredictability that undermines cost optimization efforts. Surprise charges, complex pricing tiers, and opaque resource consumption make financial planning challenging.
CloudFirst delivers financial predictability through a transparent pricing model built on fixed monthly costs with no hidden fees. Usage-based scaling aligns expenses with actual demand, ensuring clients pay for what they use, not for overprovisioned capacity driven by fear of performance issues.
Beyond pricing transparency, CloudFirst’s optimization tools actively identify underutilized resources, consolidate workloads, and reduce licensing overhead. The result is measurable operational expense (OpEx) savings that don’t sacrifice performance or reliability. For CFOs and IT leaders alike, this combination of predictability and optimization delivers the cost certainty that strategic planning requires.
Global Infrastructure Built for Resilience
Q: As businesses scale globally, what measures does CloudFirst take to ensure resilience, performance, and uptime across its Tier-3 data centers in the US, UK, and Canada?
Global operations demand global infrastructure. CloudFirst’s Tier-3 data centers strategically positioned across the US, UK, and Canada provide geographic redundancy, low-latency access, and data sovereignty compliance for multinational enterprises.
Each facility is engineered for maximum resilience: multi-layer physical and digital security, redundant power and cooling systems, and carrier-neutral connectivity that eliminates single points of failure. This architecture supports real-time failover, intelligent load balancing, and continuous performance tuning.
The result is infrastructure that scales confidently across borders while maintaining the high availability and performance that mission-critical workloads demand. Whether serving customers in New York, London, or Toronto, CloudFirst ensures consistent, reliable access to critical systems and data.
Modernizing Legacy Infrastructure Without Disruption
Q: Legacy environments often lack a clear migration path. How does CloudFirst bridge the gap between outdated infrastructure and modern cloud platforms without disrupting operations?
Legacy systems present a unique challenge. These environments often run custom applications, proprietary integrations, and business-critical workflows developed over decades. The absence of clear migration pathways can trap organizations in aging infrastructure despite the growing risks and costs.
CloudFirst specializes in bridging this modernization gap. The approach involves replicating legacy systems in the cloud while preserving the custom integrations that make these environments valuable. Rather than forcing disruptive “rip and replace” scenarios, CloudFirst enables incremental modernization through hybrid strategies.
This methodology allows clients to retain critical legacy systems while gradually introducing cloud-native capabilities. Modernization becomes an evolution rather than a revolution—reducing risk, maintaining operational continuity, and delivering value progressively rather than through high-stakes “big bang” migrations.
Staying Ahead of Evolving Cyber Threats
Q: With cybercrime costs projected to exceed $10 trillion annually by 2025, what innovations or strategic initiatives is CloudFirst investing in to stay ahead of evolving threats and client needs?
The cybersecurity threat landscape evolves constantly, and defensive strategies must evolve equally fast. With global cybercrime costs projected to exceed $10 trillion annually, reactive security postures are no longer sufficient.
CloudFirst invests proactively in next-generation security capabilities. The technology roadmap includes AI-driven threat detection that identifies anomalies before they become breaches, zero-trust architecture that assumes no user or system is inherently trustworthy, and continuous vulnerability scanning that identifies and remediates weaknesses in real time.
Strategic partnerships with leading security vendors ensure CloudFirst stays current with emerging threats, while regular penetration testing validates defensive effectiveness. Clients benefit from a security-first posture that evolves continuously with the threat landscape—providing not just protection, but confidence.
Leadership and Strategic Vision
About the Leadership Team
CloudFirst is led by an experienced executive team committed to delivering secure, resilient, and client-focused cloud solutions that drive genuine business value.
Hal Schwartz, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, brings strategic vision and operational excellence to CloudFirst’s leadership. Under his guidance, CloudFirst has remained agile, responsive, and deeply aligned with enterprise client needs—maintaining the boutique service ethos that differentiates the company in an increasingly commoditized market.
Chuck Paolillo, Chief Operating Officer, provides the technical leadership that underpins CloudFirst’s reputation for excellence. His deep expertise in infrastructure architecture, disaster recovery, and IBM Power Systems drives both innovation and operational reliability. Chuck’s hands-on approach ensures that CloudFirst’s solutions don’t just meet technical specifications—they solve real business challenges.
A New Chapter: Strategic Alignment with Performive
In 2025, CloudFirst was acquired via private equity and strategically aligned with Performive, a global provider of managed cloud and infrastructure services. This partnership represents a transformational opportunity to combine CloudFirst’s deep expertise in IBM Power Systems and compliance-driven hosting with Performive’s global scale, geographic reach, and multi-platform capabilities.
The combined organization will offer clients an expanded portfolio of modernization solutions, enhanced geographic coverage, and comprehensive support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. CloudFirst clients will benefit from Performive’s operational depth and global infrastructure while retaining the personalized, high-touch service model that has defined the CloudFirst experience.
As CloudFirst enters this next chapter, the founding vision remains unchanged: deliver boutique-level service, mission-critical reliability, and modernization without compromise. Now backed by Performive’s resources and global footprint, CloudFirst is positioned to accelerate innovation and deliver even greater value to clients worldwide.
CloudFirst: Where Mission-Critical Meets Modern
For enterprises navigating the complex intersection of legacy infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and digital transformation, CloudFirst offers more than cloud hosting, it provides genuine partnership. With proven migration methodologies, boutique-level service, and infrastructure engineered for resilience, CloudFirst enables organizations to modernize mission-critical workloads without compromise.
Learn more at cloudfirst.
