At Cloud Field Day 24, Alastair Cooke highlights three powerful takeaways shaping today’s cloud strategies. First, keep your data close and your cloud closer — the proximity of compute to data is vital for performance, driving decisions between on-premises and public cloud deployments. Second, risk and reward depend on scale — larger organizations may gain from bold, ground-up infrastructure redesigns, while smaller teams benefit from trusted, incremental approaches. Finally, innovation must be balanced with security — as AI and protocols like MCP evolve, organizations must ensure strong governance, validation, and guardrails to prevent exploitation.