Own the account
If the production account lives under a vendor’s login, you do not have a cloud strategy. You have a dependency. Accounts, domains, and billing should be in the client’s legal name from the first day.
Staging is not optional
A second environment that resembles production is how you avoid learning about a change in front of users. It does not need to be identical in size. It needs to be real enough to catch the mistake.
Restore is the backup
A backup job that has never been restored is a story you tell yourself. The first restore should happen while everyone is calm, not during an incident.
These are unfashionable points. They are also the difference between cloud as a slogan and cloud as an operating model. That is the work we prefer to do.