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. The company has built its reputation on delivering secure, scalable, and compliant cloud infrastructure tailored specifically to mission-critical workloads. It empowers enterprises to modernize without compromise, with Tier-3 data centers spanning the UK, US, and Canada, and a boutique service model that prioritizes deep partnership over commoditized provisioning.
Following its 2025 acquisition and strategic alignment with Performive, a global provider of managed cloud and infrastructure services, CloudFirst is starting a new chapter characterized by expanded scale, enhanced innovation capabilities, and truly global reach.
Seamless Migration for Mission-Critical Workloads
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 starts with a comprehensive IT assessment that maps system dependencies, establishes performance baselines, and identifies compliance risks. From there, the company develops a phased transition plan designed to ensure zero disruption to business operations.
The combination of proprietary migration tooling and hands-on expertise sets CloudFirst apart. The team replicates production environments with precision, thoroughly validates all integrations, and executes cutovers with surgical accuracy. Throughout the entire process, business continuity remains paramount.
Guaranteeing Business Continuity When Seconds Matter
CloudFirst’s DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) 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 rapid and reliable data recovery. Clients benefit from 100% uptime SLAs and recovery environments mirroring production fidelity. For organizations where every minute of availability directly impacts revenue and customer trust, this level of assurance is invaluable.
Compliance Without Complexity
Regulatory compliance has evolved from a checkbox exercise to a strategic imperative. CloudFirst builds compliance into every layer of its infrastructure. It offers audit-ready logging, encryption, and sophisticated role-based access controls. Beyond infrastructure, CloudFirst provides tailored compliance support, including gap assessments and remediation planning. This proactive approach transforms compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage.
The Boutique Advantage: Personalization Over Commoditization
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. It co-designs environments aligned with strategic business objectives. Clients receive direct access to senior engineers and benefit from SLAs adapted to business realities. This high-touch model establishes true partnerships, turning cloud migration into a shared endeavor. Challenges are solved swiftly, solutions fit perfectly, and clients feel like co-pilots, not just customers.
Predictable Economics and Optimized Performance
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. Beyond pricing transparency, CloudFirst’s optimization tools actively identify underutilized resources, consolidate workloads, and reduce licensing overhead, resulting in measurable operational expense.
Global Infrastructure Built for Resilience
CloudFirst’s Tier-3 data centers across the UK, US, and Canada offer 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.
Modernizing Legacy Infrastructure Without Disruption
The absence of clear migration pathways in legacy systems can trap organizations in aging infrastructure despite the growing risks and costs. CloudFirst specializes in bridging this modernization gap by 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.
Staying Ahead of Evolving Cyber Threats
With global cybercrime costs projected to exceed $10 trillion annually, reactive security postures are no longer sufficient. CloudFirst invests in next-generation security capabilities. The technology roadmap includes AI-driven threat detection to identify anomalies before they become breaches, a zero-trust architecture that assumes no user or system is trustworthy, and continuous vulnerability scanning to find and fix weaknesses in real-time. Strategic partnerships with leading security vendors keep CloudFirst current with emerging threats, while regular penetration testing validates defensive effectiveness.
Leadership and Strategic Vision
CloudFirst is led by an experienced executive team committed to delivering secure, resilient, and clientfocused cloud solutions that drive genuine business value. Hal Schwartz, President, brings strategic vision and operational excellence to CloudFirst’s leadership. Under his guidance, CloudFirst has remained agile, responsive, and closely aligned with the enterprise’s client needs.
A New Chapter: Strategic Alignment with Performive
The partnership with Performive 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. 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.
CloudFirst: Where Mission-Critical Meets Modern
CloudFirst offers more than cloud hosting; it provides a genuine partnership. With proven migration methodologies, boutique-level service, and infrastructure engineered for resilience, CloudFirst enables organizations to modernize mission-critical workloads without compromise.
