If you've been following the trend of the last ten years, you've definitely heard this refrain: "The cloud will revolutionize your infrastructure, everything will be simpler and cheaper." Except that in many cases, the landing is brutal. CIOs who have switched their workloads to cloud-first mode often discover a boomerang effect: skyrocketing bills, unforeseen costs, and a budget equation that is no longer optimized.
The cloud equation: between the promise of flexibility and budgetary reality
The cloud sells an irresistible promise: you only pay for what you consume. No more CAPEX, make way for OPEX. No need to plan three years ahead; you adjust your resources in real time. Except that in reality, it's not that simple.
The problem stems from a classic mistake: transposing an on-premises infrastructure as is to the cloud, without optimizing it. We think we're saving money, but we end up paying for compute and storage continuously, sometimes oversized. What was a controlled investment becomes an exponential monthly expense, without us realizing it... until we get a cold shower.
Add to that underestimated additional costs: egress fees, inactive storage, additional services activated by default, specific licenses... And suddenly, what seemed scalable becomes a financial drain.
High-priced rollbacks
The result: some companies are backtracking. We're seeing groups return to on-premises or hybrid models after discovering that their cloud bills exceeded their most pessimistic forecasts. But these returns are costly. Reverting an infrastructure is neither quick nor easy. Dependencies on cloud services create vendor lock-in that limits room for maneuver.
FinOps isn't enough to regulate everything
The rise of FinOps teams clearly illustrates the problem: dedicated experts are now needed to track and contain billing drift. This is an approach that hyperscalers don't encourage, because their model is based on the discreet accumulation of micro-billing.
The real question: which cloud strategy should we adopt?
The debate isn't for or against the cloud. It's about arbitration and design. The illusion of a plug & play cloud is dangerous. Every CIO must ask the right questions:
- Which workloads are truly suited to the cloud? Some are better optimized on-premises, in edge computing, or in a sovereign cloud.
- What are the acceptable financial limits? Have control, monitoring, and optimization mechanisms been planned before migration?
- What dependence on hyperscalers? Choosing a hybrid cloud infrastructure, with a mix of solutions, can avoid the lock-in trap.
The cloud remains a powerful lever. But systematically believing it to be more economical is a mistake. The real question is not "should we go to the cloud?" » but rather « how, and why? ».
0 Comments